


The Cities Below Us.

by his tongue and liver (doubleinfinity)



Category: Outlast (Video Games)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Anal Fingering, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Attempted Murder, Blow Jobs, Body Worship, Bonding, Build up, Colorado, Come Eating, Conversations, Crimes & Criminals, Escape, Explicit Sexual Content, Fighting Kink, Fights, First Time, Fishing, Fluff, Fluff and Smut, Foot Massage, Forests, Hand Jobs, Hitchhiking, Infiltration, Intercrural Sex, Kissing, Law Enforcement, Love Confessions, M/M, Making Out, Masturbation, Misogyny, Mount Massive Asylum, Murder, Neck Kissing, On the Run, Oral Sex, Past Torture, Porn With Plot, Porn with Feelings, Post-Mount Massive Asylum, Revenge, Romance, Romantic Soulmates, SORRY THERES A LOT OF SEX, Sewing, Sexual Fantasy, Slow Burn, Small Towns, Soulmates, Spit As Lube, Survival, Tailoring, Trauma, Vigilantism, Weapons, Wilderness, high altitude fucks, inappropriate military fantasy lol, ish, mines, they're both cum whores, trauma-sensitive sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-07
Updated: 2018-09-15
Packaged: 2019-06-06 21:34:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 23
Words: 72,106
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15203963
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doubleinfinity/pseuds/his%20tongue%20and%20liver
Summary: Tenderness and violence.Eddie’s body has received much of both. To make it simpler, he’s learned to categorize sensations on a sliding scale between the two, with markers for reference notched up and down the length of the long-ass fucking thing.Shackles to bed sheets, fathers to mothers, Chris’ talons to Chris’ fingertips.Chris and Eddie escape the asylum.They wake up alone in the Colorado wilderness, each searching for a way to recover from trauma and avoid getting recaptured.  From Eddie's childhood abuse to Chris' tours in Afghanistan, they have to learn to live with their history and violence if they want to survive.  And they realize that after everything they've done, surviving just isn't enough.





	1. chapter one. mouthing.

**Author's Note:**

> ✎ No scifi, no Walrider  
> ✎ Cw for violence, misogyny, prior sexual assault, prior abuse, and murder  
> ✎ Will add tags as I write

Tenderness and violence.

Eddie’s body has received much of both. To make it simpler, he’s learned to categorize sensations on a sliding scale between the two, with markers for reference notched up and down the length of the long-ass fucking thing.

Shackles to bed sheets, fathers to mothers, Chris’ talons to Chris’ fingertips.

In this moment, he is seated directly in the center of that measuring stick. He lies on his back in the water, ripples from the river lapping around his shoulders as he steadily continues downstream. He knows he’s in danger. The current could pick back up at any moment and sweep him faster down the waterway, cutting him to pieces against waiting rocks. He knows he needs to open his eyes and swim to the edge of land.

Instead, he keeps his eyes closed and enjoys the feeling of the cold night all around him. The sound of natural, running water. The chirp of insects and nocturnal ground mammals. The feeling of reeds and clumps of dirt brushing past his skin.

It is a pleasure he thought he would never have again. It is so dreamlike that he is afraid to open his eyes and see it vanish.

But he finally lifts his eyelids, eyelashes unfurling slowly, to see the darkened sky.

If he makes it to tomorrow, he will stand in the sunlight and he will cry.

With arms so heavy he doesn’t know why he hasn’t sunk to the bottom of the river, Eddie rolls onto his front and starts pushing towards the forest. A building tidal bore smacks against his face, filling his mouth with dirty water. He spits back, his entire body thrumming with sickening adrenalin that fights off the effects of the sedative. Particles of earth drip down his chin, washed away during his frantic swim towards the edge of the wide stream.

He makes an audible whine when his hand finds a fistful of land, fingers twisting into the mud. The river has dug itself fairly deep relative to ground level; Eddie claws at the natural wall and heaves himself up it, muddy clay coating his arms and chest.

When he finally flops down onto the surface floor, he feels like he has no breath left. He really should try to muster up his remaining strength and find shelter. But there had been no way to avoid taking the drugs all the patients were routinely given, so they had leapt from the hallway window knowing full well they’d be unconscious not long after. They’d tried to lie on their backs and hope that if they tipped over, their bodies would wake them before they drowned.

Walker might still have drowned. Eddie can’t see him anywhere.

Inching along the ground, Eddie’s arms drag him to the base of a tree. He lets himself fall limp on the ground, his bedsheets stitched of tattered leaves from the near-autumn weather. Rocks and pinecones surround him like a set of pillows or a habit of stuffed animals.

Eddie himself might still be dead before he wakes up next.

But even that thought pushes him all the way to the left of the scale. He would rather die here tonight than continue living in the asylum. He would rather Chris be dead than caught and dragged back.

He wants to know if the sun feels like what he imagines it feels like.

°

It’s afternoon by the time Eddie peels himself off the ground and stumbles further down the inclined forest, following the river. The morning is still low, with the sun brushing through the thick leaves all around him. Birds have already woken and are calling to each other in different tones. He’s too shaken to observe any of it. It all feels too surreal to grasp.

Wobbly on his feet, the male continues until he discovers a dam in the river. A fallen tree split into two logs blocks the river from progressing, leaving the current streaming through the cracks in the barricade.

When it rains, it must overflow here. But that’s not what’s important. The fact that Walker’s body isn’t lying here, caught in it, means that he got out somewhere earlier. Maybe he’s even around here somewhere, and like Eddie, is tracing a path to the river’s mouth in hopes of finding a more-populated area.

Lake County is extremely remote, especially because of its mountain-dominated landscape. It might take weeks before he can get anywhere. Eddie won’t last weeks. His body is already unfastening from itself.

Just as he’s about to set off, continuing the trudge downstream, he hears something zoom through the woodland.

His heart creeping to his throat, Eddie darts away from the river in search of it, forcing his legs up a mound in the land.

Between the trees, a few feet below him, a strip of pavement winds out of nowhere and disappears back into the foliage. Eddie takes in a breath and drops onto his butt, sliding down the hill to land on the edge of the road. There are cars here. Maybe Mount Massive cars. Maybe. But hopefully campers or residents who are merely passing through.

Dirt cakes him entirely, which he acknowledges after glancing down to consider what he’d look like from the outside. His white t-shirt is so grimy that he should rip it off, his baggy, gray-hospital pants soaked through. Short black hair falls wildly to his cheekbones, and every stretch of his flesh is pale and malnourished. He’s missing the axe, but every single one of his other features scream danger. At least his clothes don’t have prisoner numbers stamped onto them.

He needs to get up and follow the road but he can’t. He slumps down against the inclining land and waits helplessly, panting. This is Colorado- this is the middle of the country. There must be people much worse than him looking for a ride out in these places.

But then, for most of his adult life, he’s been kept in a cage. He has no idea what he thinks or doesn’t think.

As he waits, he looks up and squints at the sky. The sun presses against the thick clouds rolling through the atmosphere, creating a halo of blinding white. His body aches to absorb it. The sickly pearl of his skin is starving to death.

His eyes are going to burn the fuck out but he doesn’t turn his face to the side. Even when spots collect in his vision, burning at the edges of his eyeballs, he resists. He’s lucky the sun isn’t out. He would not protest being burned away beneath it.

°

The crickets are back out and Eddie’s stomach is roiling with hunger by the time it happens. After a long day of nothing, bright yellow headlights suddenly cut through the dusk, beaming light onto the rapidly darkening road.

Almost having fused with the pile of dirt, Eddie leaps to his feet immediately, throwing his arms into the air. He plants one foot defiantly into the road, waving his hand desperately until the green-black truck comes to a stop, the driver swiveling his head around in confusion as he rolls past. It’s less subtle than a thumb in the air, but Eddie hopes he can create a sense of urgency without coming on too frightening.

He holds his breath and his ground as the driver steadily backs up to meet him, rolling down his window.

The man looks to be in his mid-thirties, a new beard growing in tandem with his long, orange-blonde hair. He runs his eyes up and down Eddie’s rough figure, searching for anything that might pose a risk to him.

“Are you okay? You lost or something?” the man asks.

“ _Yes,_ ” Eddie breathes back, his voice strained from disuse. He forces himself to take a steadying breath of air before continuing. “Me and my friend were camping out here the other night when that storm opened up.” It’s the story he’d rehearsed all afternoon. Two days ago, the asylum was hit by a thunder and lightening storm so powerful that half the power was knocked out. It’s why everything got so chaotic, why it finally seemed like a good time to take advantage of the window that hung loose if pulled hard enough. “I don’t know where I am. I went to look for help as he went to find the car, but… I don’t… I don’t know what happened to him.”

The driver purses his lips and looks Eddie over once more, then stops him with a, “Come on then, you can tell me the rest of it in the car.”

Eddie fills with hope. He gathers himself and scrambles over to the passenger’s side, pulling open the door. He’s a tall man himself, but the car is so elevated by its tires that he has to jump up to get in, which is almost enough to do his body in for good.

The trucks’ interior more than overcompensates.

The polyester seats have been cloaked in a soft plaid material, blue and red and so much like a blanket, especially under the guise of night. The dashboard is large and close, giving everything a very cozy feel. The space feels well-lived-in; an empty hotcup from a coffee is wedged into the cupholder amongst receipts, novelty plastic toys, and containers for mint and dip.

Eddie slides down into it, buckling himself in. “Fuck,” he murmurs to himself, rubbing his eyes with his hands. “Thank you.”

“You don’t _ever_ split up, not in these remote areas,” the driver tells him. “But maybe you can get some rangers out there to help.” He puts the car in drive. “I can get you back to Leadville- I’m stopping there first, and they have a railway station you can use. Can call in help for your friend while you’re there. Where you from anyways?”

Eddie flicks his eyes across the floor, drawing his bare feet closer together to avoid touching his toes to the filth collected there. “Anaheim,” he lies quietly. He picks up his feet altogether, wrapping them underneath him on the seat. “It was supposed to be… adventurous.”

The male doesn’t offer up anything about himself: no name, no destination, no sympathies. They drive on in quiet, Eddie lulling off into a half-sleep from the blasting heat and comfortable chair.

“Can you help me?”

The question pushes him to full alertness. He notices that the truck has been turned off and they’re standing still. “Yeah?” he asks urgently, voice and vision bleary. He blinks to try to see the world better. Outside the window, darkness and trees persist.

The man opens his door. “I need to fill up the tank. We’re not close enough to town.”

Eddie nods and rolls out of the car, landing on his feet on the chilly asphalt below. His naked skin rejoices at the touch; his mind refuses to believe what it’s feeling. The air is fresh and natural. There is grass and humidity, toads croaking, bugs darting through the dirt. He sucks in a breath to keep his emotions under control. He truly never thought he’d feel any of this again. It’s been nearly twenty years since he’s been outside. At least fifteen since he’d relinquished the belief he ever would be again.

He pulls his arms around himself, shielding his body from the cold.

The driver reaches into the back of the truck and pulls out a red gas can. He has a flashlight turned on and wedged underneath his arm.

“Get that?” he asks.

Eddie jolts, standing at attention, looking towards where the man is indicating. He reaches down for the fuel cap and his hands shake, fumbling with it. He’s unfamiliar with cars and is turning it the wrong way; he twists it correctly and it clicks off and promptly falls out of his grasp and onto the ground.

Shame drips down him. He is filled with fear at having failed to execute this command.

The man sighs and simply hands him the flashlight, bending over to insert the nozzle of the can into the fuel neck. Eddie holds it steady, but his body quivers with rage at the asylum and embarrassment at himself. He can’t even do the things men are supposed to know how to do. He can’t do one damn thing.

He brings his other hand to grip the length of the flashlight in both fists. The man is bent over. One bash to the skull and he can kill him and take his car. The body will be easy to roll into the forest. He won’t be found for ages.

Easy… yet he can’t do it.

_Is this why you only kill women?_ he asks himself. _Because you’re afraid of your victim being stronger than you?_

Eddie squeezes his eyes shut, fighting off the condescending voice.

When he opens his eyes the male is finished, screwing the cap back on. Eddie hands over the flashlight wordlessly, standing and waiting for an instruction. He hates this. He is standing out in the world but the rules of the asylum are still within him, as though an electric collar has been wrapped around his throat and is still controlling how he acts.

“Back in,” the man tells him, a note of annoyance in his voice. Or maybe that’s just how people sound and he’s irrationally interpreting it. Eddie doesn’t know.

He crawls back into the seat, closing the door behind him.

“Um-” he starts, hateful of the way his voice shakes. “Do you have anything to eat?”

“I think so,” the gruff voice responds, friendlier-sounding this time. The ginger roots around in the cupholders and comes away successfully, a granola bar in his hand. Eddie takes it, breathing a stream of thanks, and tears it open.

The man starts the car, sending them rumbling back down the road, and before Eddie has finished chomping through his first bite, he feels a hand come down to rest on his leg.

Frozen, he darts his eyes down. The man’s hand rests on his lower thigh, fingers spread out to grip his skin. He tries carefully to avoid making a small noise around the granola bar and shifts his eyes to the window, unmoving. He should do something. But when a minute passes and nothing more comes of it, he finishes his bite and just lets the man’s hand sit there, unwanted but not escalating.

He chews slowly, really thinking about Chris for the first time since he woke up in the river bed.

They didn’t make any plans for what they’d do after they got out. There was no way to know what landmarks or cities would be around; neither of them are familiar with this state. They were just shuttled here.

_You’ll find a ride from someone,_ Chris had teased him the night before, when they were huddled in Chris’ bed, solidifying the plan under hushed breaths. _Your face is too fucking pretty._

He had predicted correctly. Too correctly.

But then, isn’t this what Eddie’s problem has always been? Attracting people he shouldn’t. Because then he hurts them, or they hurt him. It all just depends on the context.

Chris exists at every stopping point between violence and tenderness, but somehow Eddie doesn’t feel like they’ve ever hurt each other. Even now, when his chest twists with the fear that the blonde is dead out there, lying on the forest ground, he doesn’t feel hurt. He feels absolutely blessed to have had him. No matter what happens to either of them moving forward.

The driver’s hand squeezes his leg from time to time but doesn’t take it much farther. Eddie doesn’t fight back against it, even though he squirms internally at the sick feeling it fills him with.

After he finishes eating, he slouches back into the seat. If he leans his head against the window pane and looks up, he can see stars in the night sky. If he closes his eyes and allows the drowsiness to overcome him, he can pretend that Chris’ hand is grasping him in a firm presentation of security.


	2. chapter two. strongfat and the dancer.

Finally.

Fucking _finally_.

Something he can survive at.

Chris has been poked with weapons as bad as branding rods at the asylum because he didn’t know how to execute self-preservation inside those walls. But here? He knows how to survive in the wilderness.

After dragging himself out of the river, it was easy work to kindle a small fire and warm his hands. The night nurses have a habit of pumping him with more meds than the others… girth-wise. But girth-wise, his body is pretty damn good at resisting them, even in larger doses. Chemical compounds don’t phase you as bad when you root your fingers around your throat until you throw up half-dissolved tablets over the side of your bed.

Once he’s dry and comfortable, he blows out the flames and does a scan of the forest. He can’t gauge how far away he is from Mount Massive. It appears he was asleep for a long time, that is, if the sedatives aren’t deceiving him. Objectively, the forest seems undisturbed by human influence, with no markers on the trees or any sort of trash mixed into the underbrush.

When he was a soldier he learned to stay alive in these places, even if it meant gnawing on the flesh of his own wrists.

He’s lucky enough to not have to this time.

His stomach is still tumbling with sickness, but he sees plenty of edible plants that will be useful in the morning. Right now, the only important flora is the tall tree he’s noticing. He places two steady hands on its upper trunk and hoists himself up, disappearing into the mask of well-sprouted branches. He doesn’t have any ropes to tie himself to it, but he pulls off his wet pants and tries to secure his legs as much as possible. The risk of falling is worth the risk of a police dog ripping at his unconscious throat.

As grateful for his survival skills as he is, Chris knows that if he didn’t learn to adapt like this in the first place, he wouldn’t have ended up here at all. He shouldn’t have killed those three men in the months after his service. His mind should have been stronger. His psyche should have seen them for what they were: veterans and his coworkers at Spindletop, as like to him as he is to a madman.

That’s what they’ve been telling him in therapy, at least. He’s been told that he snapped and forgot where he was. He lost his mind and believed that they were his men, under attack, and he had to kill them before they were tortured by the enemy. Or he thought they _were_ the enemy and he had to subdue them. Something like that. It’s all within the realm of believable to him.

He’s had a lot of time to think about it. But honestly, he’s been through too much of the whole clusterfuck to know the answer.

There have been a lot of men who begged him to kill them- both pow’s hung from the ceiling of his own prison, as well as American soldiers being ripped away from their camp by men who beheaded slowly and publicly.

As he falls back asleep, he tries to imagine the faces of the three veterans who got him placed in the asylum. He can’t recall any details about the job he took after his final tour, much less the men he is supposed to have killed. He had been locked out of reality in a haze of PTSD, his mind constantly in crisis mode.

But even if those memories fail to transpire, he has a knack for remembering the faces of the Afghanistani soldiers.

That violence doesn’t ever leave his mind. Neither do the permanent folds of pain in their faces, or the things that they did to them. All it got was a big fucking handshake from the president. But a triad of head ripping- _head ripping_ \- a clean, merciful death upon white skin unstained by feces and _that_ is what he is locked away for. Everything about it revolts him.

…Eddie is different. He’s always been so different.

Eddie Gluskin dances with violence. He tiptoes around it gracefully, dipping into it when he needs to. It is a part of him and Chris fell in love with that. He wants to be that. He wants to gaze through the pinhole of his memories and feel proud of what he did. He wants the blood to nourish him, make him stronger.

Instead, it breaks his mind.

It breaks his fucking heart. It picks up his humanity and smashes it on the ground, then twists on its heels to grind him into the dirt. But he can’t get away from it. He can’t get it out of him.

Chris is grateful for the drugs that didn’t make it out of his system before dissolving. He needs them, and uses them now, to force himself away from this ache and into the safehouse of sleep.

°

He wakes up displaced.

Initially, his body assumes that it’s in the asylum and that he’s emerging from a dream about the war. Then, as the tree branch continues to materialize underneath him, his ears pick up the buzz of a voice spoken through an electric filter. The world is forced to snap in place around him.

Sluggish hands swiftly untie the cable he’d created out of his pants and then he draws his entire body inward to hide, bare thighs scraping against the bark. Chris presses his back into the steading trunk of the tree and searches for movement between clusters of leaves.

The police radio goes off again, a muffled chatter vibrating through an unseen device.

This time, a man responds, reporting on their no-new-updates status. Chris turns in the direction of the sound, lowering his head to peer through a break in the branches. There are four men in uniform stalking through the area, kicking back piles of leaves, surely looking for signs of the two missing patients.

Chris waits in his concealed position, unsure how to proceed.

He and Eddie had operated under the basic assumption that someone would probably come after them at some point. The doctors might not be keeping careful records of their names and faces, but two empty beds in an overcrowded institution would certainly give away their absence. So would the window that was wide open- no bodies split open on the ground below suggested there were bodies, albeit alive or dead, further into the wilderness

It’s hard to imagine that Murkoff would worry too dearly. They beat their patients into such a pulpy, submissive consistency that they were left unattended more frequently than not. (Unless they had a history of violence. (In which case they were restrained indefinitely. As Chris learned back when he thought he could claw himself out like he did in Afghanistan)).

It was also hard to believe that spouting stories of what happened inside the asylum would get much of a response. Who fucking cared? None of them had families outside who were keeping track of them. They were just barcodes in cotton. Chris doubts anyone would look too hard for him unless he gave away his location by thinking somebody would _actually_ conduct an internal investigation. He hopes that if Eddie was lucky enough to make it out of the radius of the asylum, he’d know that too. Eddie was unpredictable sometimes.

The earliest edition of their plan had actually included pushing somebody out of the window first, just to give them an extra layer of coverage. Make it look like it was a suicide thing, not an escape. Truthfully, there were more than a dozen candidates Chris would have loved to watch tumble three stories to the ground, but it was already hard enough to execute with two fully-willing participants.

… He’s thinking too much.

Chris follows the group of men with his eyes for the next few minutes, trying to narrow his mind down to this single moment.

By the time he’s nearly become a tree himself, one of the males has straggled further from the group, pointing his attention towards the river. He brings the front of his boot towards the edge, toeing at a place in which the mud is uprooted in long lines. Chris breathes through his nose, watching. The man has located the place where Chris raked his fingers through the mud and tore himself out of the water.

The man thoughtfully fingers the radio clipped to his collar, probably wondering if this is worth calling out.

He’s dead before he can angle his neck to transmit the message.

Chris jumps down from the tree, landing noiselessly behind the Murkoff employee. He falls precisely where he needs to, grabs the palm-sized, jagged rock that he spotted while crouched, and advances silently. As he creeps forward, he wraps one of the pant legs around his hand to prevent skin-to-skin contact. Then he lunges up, grabbing the officer. He wraps his fingers around his mouth and pulls, slamming his skull into the rock.

The body goes limp in his arms before the man can react. Chris guides it onto the ground as it falls, placing the rock beneath the man’s head so it looks like he slipped and fell in an unfortunate spot. The man’s rubber boots are already coated with mud. It looks like a stupid mistake made by a new, young officer.

Tactically, Chris uses his own feet to smooth the upset riverbed, paving down the mud so that no marks stand out against it anymore. It must look like he was never here.

He’s almost done.

With his fingers still protected by his clothing, he slips a hand into the officer’s pocket, pulling out his cell phone. He swipes up and uses the knuckle of an unsheathed finger to open the GPS app, eyes blinking against a piece of technology that he hasn’t seen much of in the last decade. It’s better than what he got as military police.

The vibrant green and yellow lines streaking across the screen show what he expects: nothing much. But as he zooms out by dragging two knuckles across the surface, looking for signs of satellite reading on Mount Massive, he notices something more important: a road etched across the barren, greenish deadzones.

It’s impossible to tell from distance alone, and he’s too apprehensive to actually click on anything, but there is a local town on the map.

He burns the image into his mind, memorizing where the road splits off and in what direction he’ll have to travel to get to it. As soon as he’s half-confident he can recreate it mentally, he closes the app and slides the phone back into the man’s pocket. The best thing to do now is turn back and get as much distance from here as he can without running into other surveyors.

This is good. This is a plan.

He’ll backtrack for now, locate the road, and then sneak back in to travel along it while hiding under the cover of the trees. He won’t lose sight of where he is, even when he can’t physically see the street. His spatial reasoning is good. His instincts are good.

And eventually, he’ll find the town.

Then he will let himself worry about finding Eddie.

Chris can survive in the wilderness. It’ll be like old times, but he’ll be treating less men like dogs.

He unwinds his pants, rushes to throw them back onto his body, and goes.


	3. chapter three.  untouchable.

It starts going to that place because… well, he doesn’t know. How the fuck is he supposed to know?

The sun is glinting softly against the landscape when they enter Leadville, a luminous dust just brushing past the towering mountains. Eddie’s first impression of the settlement evokes mental images of tumbleweeds and yellow fever, although the area becomes more industrial as they approach the town square. There are no tall chrome buildings, but the road has been paved well.

They pull into a darkly-lit gas station. Mack, the driver, shares a few stories about the town’s history, from its roots in the silver-mining industry to its lawless past. Reminds him of those tattered wild-west paperbacks with horses on the cover.

“Mmm,” he considers after he’s finished being told about all the deputies shot here, all the female gamblers who came out richer than boarding school girls. “Sounds like remarkably wild tales to promote such a shit town.” But then he notices a sign that actually reads _saloon_ and the words rust on his tongue.

Mack isn’t too bad, as Eddie finds out.

The longer they drove, the more he was willing to talk. The man works for something called Ball Aerospace and is traveling back to Boulder with a trunk full of Nevadan electrical equipment. He’d talked his lumberjack-sized lungs out of breath about space exploration and autonomous cars. Not like Eddie can follow or would even give a shit if he could. But he likes men who talk. They give a lot away about themselves. It also gives him a second to pretend he’s somebody else, with concerns outside the realm of merely surviving trauma.

 _It’s not trauma yet_ , he reminds himself. Some of it is, yeah, but the asylum is still actively happening to him. He can’t curl up into a ball and try to process it until he’s completely out of danger.

Things start going to that place only after Mack finishes filling up his tank; he lingers for a moment next to the fuel dispensers before getting back en route. “So you’re good?” he confirms with the hitchhiker. “You know where to go?”

Eddie squints against the skyline, observing the silhouette of the town. They’re currently rooted in the cold of dawn, meaning that it will probably be another hour before anyone appears in the streets. Maybe at least five until businesses start opening their doors. Eddie gives a tentative, distracted nod as he looks over the different shopfronts on the main street. His stomach clenches when he catches sight of a wooden _café_ sign.

“Here,” Mack offers out of nowhere, pressing two 20’s into Eddie’s hand. “Go over to city hall and get them to print you a train schedule. They’ll change you for quarters so you can call your folks in California.”

His palm curling around the money, Eddie feels his chest bloom with pain. He aches to believe his own lies, but in this world, there’s nobody out there for him or anywhere for him to go. Chris was all he had, and right now, Chris is either dead or the equivalent. Unreachable.

The sun in his eyes and the crispness of the air still feels unbelievable. It’s a cognitive and perceptual overload. He’s shivering in his thin clothing and yet even that sensation is glorious. After being locked away for so long, he knows there must be _so_ many new things in this world that he doesn’t understand… but nothing about the air has changed. He’s dreamt about being outside for so most of his adult life.

“Thank you,” Eddie murmurs to himself, holding awkwardly onto the bills because he doesn’t have any pockets to put them in.

And so their encounter is finished. Nothing forces him to follow the man after they’ve formally parted, now that Mack is moving on to the next city. But he is compelled to and for that reason he does.

As he walks, he convinces himself that he wants to ask if Mack will drive him just a bit closer to Denver, despite knowing the man doesn’t want to. He could even ask to use his pocket phone, but then again, Eddie doesn’t know the area code for cities in California and Mack has one of those strange rectangular things without the buttons.

He trails a few steps behind as the ginger rounds the corner and disappears into an open-roofed alcove on the side of the gas station. Inside of the dividing walls are two public bathroom stalls, dedicated to males and females respectively. He waits in front of the rusted metal door until he hears Mack flush the toilet and wash his hands. Eddie takes his two bills and wedges them under a rock on the ground for the time being.

As soon as the male opens the door to exit, Eddie shoves his way in, forcing the trucker to step back into the one-person stall.

Twisting the lock behind him, Eddie doesn’t know what he’s going to do. A very small part of him thinks that he needs to kill this man. His eyes rake up the other’s deliberating face, taking in his scraggly beard and overflowing orange hair. He’s unsure of his own strategy, but his eyes flash with an intensity that can be read any number of ways. Mack seems stunned, expectant.

He reaches out and grabs the man’s neck, too lightly to be a threat. He feels none of the fire of disgust he needs to kill. He only feels it towards himself. So he decides that he will kill himself with it instead.

Mack’s arms go up to grab Eddie’s elbows, circling around them as Eddie guides him towards the toilet.

He steers the man onto the closed toilet seat, sitting down on top of him. Mack makes a grunting noise, the sound of pleased shock, and communicates it by sliding his hands underneath Eddie’s shirt. “Wow, I- didn’t think you were interested,” he comments.

“Shut up,” Eddie snaps, his temper flaring. He’s only doing this because he knows it will happen anyway and he wants to be in control when it does. (…Even though Mack was just about to leave). He’s doing this because it feels good to be touched by somebody and not have it tainted by the asylum. (Even if there’s a brown-tinted sink to his left and bundles of soggy toilet paper all over the floor).

He’s only doing this because he refuses to owe anyone for their _kindness._ Kindness is transactional in this world and he’d rather pay it now.

He reaches down and unzips Mack’s pants to pull his penis out, fisting it until it grows fully erect in his palm. His own body is heated in shameful excitement, sick with a disgust that only makes him crazier as it crawls over his skin.

His thoughts pass from Chris to his father, and he is miserable to have them occupy the same frame of mind. This moment is nothing like moments with either of them were. (Eddie, hungry for Chris to turn violent. Desperate for his father to be affectionate…)

Most men don’t need flowers or teasing strokes to be content when he’s finished. He’s fast and precise with his hands, and given a better environment, could offer a lot more than he currently is. But he’s slightly grateful for those limitations right now, when the driver’s hand slips beneath his ass and start prodding at his asshole through the clothing, because if this man thinks he’s going to fuck Eddie here, he’s wrong.

He runs his palm flat over the tip of the man’s cock, coming away with his hand wet with precum, and then snakes back down to continue with emphasis on the underside of his penis. It’s a crafty move that makes Mack breathe heavier, his hands losing focus of their actions. It only takes ten more seconds to make him come, semen spurting in short bursts until it’s rolling down his knuckles and the back of his hand.

Mack puts his head back, breathing sharply through his nose. Eddie lets his tongue hang slightly as he pumps the last spurts of semen out of him. He feels incredibly angry about how satisfied he feels, especially in the absence of so much as a touch of sexual gratification.

“Just so you know, I wasn’t interested, but… being stranded in the wilderness will do that,” he justifies, eyes lancing towards the ground.

Eddie jumps off the man’s lap. Standing at the sink, he turns on the faucet, running a cold stream of water over his hands to wash off the filth. His face burns in response to watching the milky substance stream off him and disappear down the drain, reminding him of his own humiliation. And then the water starts running warm. He blinks, his mood changing.

Pricks of tears pull at his eyes. His body flushes with a new kind of pleasure, so absolute that he dips his head under the faucet before he can think about doing it. He runs both hands under the water and splashes his hair with it, neatly throwing back the strands of his black, side-shaved mane.

It feels so good. It feels so fucking good.

“Go,” he snarls out of the corner of his mouth at the driver, holding back the sob in his voice. “Get the fuck out of here.”

Mack sits struck, looking at him as though he’s an animal shifting from domesticated to unpredictable. And that’s probably a reasonable assessment. But the man has no reason to be invested anymore, so he pulls himself back into his pants and crosses the bathroom, looking slightly angry and extremely confused.

The door unlocks and closes behind him, Mack serving him a quiet and possibly ironic “good luck.” Eddie resumes, palming water onto his face. Next, he runs the length of both arms under the warm stream, rubbing to clean off the dirt caked to them. He can’t salvage all of his body. It’s not a fucking shower. But it’s enough to make him feel reborn.

When he’s dripping with water and his body is glowing from the warmth, Eddie raises his head and squeezes his eyes shut.

“Where are you?” he moans to himself suddenly, his chest tightening at another unwanted and sporadic thought of Chris. It’s been a little more than a day without him and he’s already lost complete sight of who he is. Without the other’s stabilizing force, he is untethered. Without Chris to crush their windpipes, he misses the jugular every time.

But maybe this is how it has to be. Maybe this is how he survives.

°

Eddie walks wraith-wise through the golden city, drifting eerily as he waits for residents to follow the arc of the glistening sun.

The main street he’s on is comprised majorly of storefronts and city structures. He crumples the $40 up in his hand and pokes around at different glass windows, peeking into the commercial buildings. As he goes from door to door, chills rake up his spine. It’s an open area; this town is very wide and very under-populated. He can’t help but feel as though somebody is silently watching him from an above-shop apartment, or maybe even from the ragged mountains that pierce the eastern skyline, up on an unseen radio tower.

He’s nervous that somebody might call the police on him for his bizarre appearance. He’s barely clothed, there are wounds up and down his bare skin, and his flesh is two shades away from matching the color of his bones. He also happens to be wandering up and down the street at some ungodly hour.

After checking out a brickwork building that turns out to be town hall (the bulletin board on the lawn displays the minutes from a city council meeting) and a barber shop/nail salon, he comes to the café. Eddie rests his head longingly against the pane.

In lieu of an illustrated menu or chalkboard promoting the daily specials, the gleaming silver high-top chairs and colorful booths get Eddie’s mouth watering. A sign taped to the inside of the glass shows them opening at 9am, but Eddie has no idea when that is.

He stays like that for a moment, exhaustion and hunger rendering him motionless, until he hears boots hitting the street behind him. He startles and whirls around, frozen as a he meets the curious eyes of a man who goes as still as he is.

The man takes an accusatory step forward and Eddie’s entire body reacts. He ducks down to hide inside of himself, tucking his head under his arms.

“Hey- hey, no, it’s okay,” the man assures him in a gentle voice, as though addressing a wild animal. The keys in his hand jangle loosely, but otherwise, he makes no unexpected movements. Eddie uncurls cautiously, allowing himself a glance at the person’s wrinkled face and puffy blue winter coat. “What’s wrong?” the man continues, “are you local?”

All at once Eddie feels like a child. He has the urge to bury his face into his arm and cry, but he doesn’t make it that far before the tears start. This is somebody asking him if he’s okay. This is somebody who doesn’t know who he is, trying to offer comfort. He wants to be angry at himself for being so weak, but it’s hard to register that when somebody is being kind to him.

“Please,” the man says, hiking up the keyring so that one of them sits firmly in his hand, pointed out. “Come inside.”

The temperature inside of the café is much warmer than outside, but even so, Eddie is shivering in his scant clothing. He’s guided into one of the only two booths that aren’t lined up against the front windows, effectively hiding him in the corner where the bar ends.

He places his arms on the top of the empty table, feeling them quake against the plastic. He’s terrified. This is where everything can start to go wrong- this is where he outs himself as abnormal, gives a business owner with good credit a reason to call the police and report him. From there, he’ll find out that Murkoff called down to the nearest town (because of course they are going to fucking do that, he is an imbecile for even being here) and they’ll identify him in a heartbeat. But he can’t move. For all the fate he once believed in, his body refuses to move from this situation in which he feels like he is being _helped_.

The storeowner returns from the backroom, carrying a blanket on his arm. He walks over to Eddie and offers it, allowing the younger to wrap its heavily-woven fabric around his shoulders. He’s still disgusted by what he did with the driver. It was wasted energy and mental space that he needed to conserve. Eddie keeps his hands neatly curled on the table, shaking visibly.

“My cooks aren’t in for another hour, but I put coffee on, if you’re interested.”

Eddie looks up, his gray eyes wide with hunger. He flattens his hand onto the table, letting the money he has display itself. “Yes,” he quavers, swallowing. “Please.”

The owner promptly slides down into the seat across from Eddie, folding his hands onto the table. “James Conway,” he introduces himself, “Who are you?”

“Eddie,” he doesn’t even lie, pulling at the ragged ends of the blanket.

“Eddie,” James repeats, mouth turned down. “Can you tell me what happened to you?”

The story that he gave to the driver returns to his lips, ready to go. But something about this man morphs it. “I…” he starts, looking at his hands. “I really could use a cup of coffee.” He flutters his eyes down, studying the corner of the table. “I’m trying to think of how to say it out loud.”

And indeed he is.

When James slides out of the booth with a sympathetic pat to the table, Eddie’s mind races, filling with workable details. Pieces of his past line up with egregious misconstruction of memories. Things he’s felt for years twist and harden into a truth that never happened, and yet is somehow real when he looks into the grist of his emotions. It’s like a tea reading in which the leaves offer a new way to explain what happened to him- while also preserving a bit of his humility.

Five minutes later, James comes out carrying two mugs of coffee. He has the handles of both cups looped around one hand, with a white container of sugar in the other. Eddie’s stomach tightens in terrible excitement.

Eddie’s hands go around the warm mug as soon as it’s placed in front of him, bringing it up to his face to inhale the aromatic steam. His fingers fumble gently as he unpacks the sugar and pours two servings of it into the coffee. This is happening too quickly. He’s not ready for all these lost pleasures to come back into his life.

“Well, I…” he trails off again, clinging to the drink for warmth. “I’m going to sound like an absolute sissy, really, when you hear this.” He smiles softly to himself and finally takes a sip of the coffee.

It’s everything. It’s sweet and bitter and heavy on his tongue. It’s everything he thought he would never have again. The tears prick back at his eyes, but this time, they are too full to use.

“It’s okay, I won’t think that way,” James prompts him, his eyes making that sad, sympathetic shape that the therapists used on him when he was first admitted. He had been such a “special” case- they’d tried very hard to thoroughly dig up his mind. But even the therapists stopped showing up about five years ago. Murkoff probably realized it didn’t need a front anymore. It was simple. No one gave a fuck what they were really doing. They needed data of a different kind, and it had more to do with his present state of mind than his history. His history wasn’t anything more than the vessel that got him into their hands.

Eddie looks into his mug, brooding. “I was trying to get away from my girl, she…” He blinks and then makes a small gesture to his face, licked by cuts and bruises. His arms are only worse, decorated in an array of wounds that are fresh and old alike. “I truly do not know what is inside that woman, only that it’s vicious. I’m really, though, I’m really… scared. I’m really scared for myself. All my friends think I’m being ridiculous. They say, ‘Toughen up, Eddie. You let her walk all over you.’ But…”

James holds his own mug in his hand, but he keeps his focus on Eddie and avoids so much as a sip. He nods, expression unchanged.

Eddie continues, pulling back a long swill. “I got so afraid I just left. Didn’t take anything except the cash out of my pocket. I sliced up my credit cards, packed a meal, and jumped on a train out of the state.” He circles the mug in his hands, stirring the liquid. “I think she would kill me if she saw me again. And I know it’s ludicrous- this doesn’t happen to men.” He shrugs, the sharp action slipping a tear down his cheek. “That’s why I couldn’t stay. No one was taking me seriously. It seemed she were to kill me in my sleep and everyone would just laugh.”

For half a second he expects this man to stand up and clap. Congratulate him on his performance with an ovation followed by a whistle that calls in the police.

Instead, James’ hand stretches out over the table, offering a symbol of kinship. “I believe you,” he promises, intentionally seeking contact with Eddie’s eyes. “And I will help you.”

Eddie lets out a gust of air, rippling the surface of his coffee. It’s a relief that he has no claim to. But he wants it. He will tuck it under his arm and protect it for as long as he can stay slippery in the arms of the asylum.


	4. chapter four. brass knuckles, golden thimble.

Help comes in the form of 800 calories and a burner of grease. Then, after Eddie has shorn through the hamburger and steak fries, another hundred are tacked on with a milkshake. Every bite fills him to the tip of his soul. Even his bellyache afterwards barrels straight through twenty years of stale bread, tap water, and old meals served out of dusty cans.

James hasn’t gone as far as to close down the diner for him. As he eats what the cooks prepared him, the open sign on the door is flipped to face the street. A couple of residents wander in to take coffee and bacon at the bar, dipping their heads over the newspapers James laid out. Only two people settle down into a booth for a proper breakfast.

None of them are eating hamburgers, but then, none of them have fisted their hearts in front of the owner and turned its contents inside-out. A burger at 9am might not seem like much, but in the asylum, special treatment could mean anything from a softer blanket to a softer beating. So he’ll take 900 calories as the right hand of god.

Eddie turns his body to the interior of the wall, unable to so much as swipe his eyes along the details of their clothing or faces. They look too different from him. They carry themselves easily. The chatter they make among one another is lazily superficial and unnecessarily friendly, sewn with words he does not know.

The next time James comes back around, Eddie’s plate is empty and the male has a device in his hand. Eddie eyes it wearily.

“Listen, Eddie,” he presses delicately, eyebrows a tuft of sympathetic gray-brown. “Don’t take this the wrong way, it’s a small town, but we have a couple of guys at the station who I think could help you.” He offers up the phone, a set of numbers already clicked into the screen. “And I can walk you through the whole process if you need me to. I truly think you should get this on record.”

Eddie takes the phone into his open palm, looking at the colorful symbols. It fits weirdly in his hand, so that his fingers can’t reach the buttons while he’s holding it. Frustratedly, he lays it on the table and stares at the virtual keys.

“No- no, really,” he stutters, chest filling with anxiety. His mind folds in on itself, acutely aware of his ineptitude. He comes from a time of chunky phones with cords curling out of them, plus the few flip phones he’s seen nurses peek at during their shifts. “I don’t need them to question me too. I just want to put all of this horror behind me.”

Horror.

How many did he get through before they took him by the wrists?

Eight, ten, a baker’s dozen? It didn’t matter after a certain point. He had loved his wife. He had idolized the heels of her feet, even when they were walking away, even when they were grinding down on his chest. Whether in tall, red shoes at a restaurant, or barefoot on the kitchen floor. Or when she bashed him over the head with the hot pan because he wouldn’t let go of her, which had been her last mistake, because as soon as he hit the floor he grabbed her by the ankle and it was all over for her.

He wondered what they did with all the bodies. Were they easy to peel off each other, or did they cling to the basement floor, a melted entity of arbitrary women and one spouse?

At times, the asylum had made him feel like a victim, letting him weep about how womanhood had misled him. Other times he wept with regret and disgust at himself. Sometimes they stuck pins into his side and called him names that upset him so deeply he could only feel martyred for his actions.

But the scientists aren’t here to tell him how to feel. They aren’t here to wake him with sirens every time he puts down his head to sleep, or promise him food if he begs God to forgive him, or ask him how he feels when they show him the reels that his father created.

“I just want to keep moving,” he rushes out, tripping over his words. “Perhaps I can… face her at some point in the near future, but right now, I’d prefer to work my way back.”

He pushes the phone away with the tips of his fingers and maneuvers out of the booth, holding the wrinkled bills in his hand. “Take what you need and I’ll be out of your hair.” He watches the man with wide eyes, darting them at the other customers. He breathes out, trying to calm himself.

James sighs and finally presses both palms on the table, helping himself out of the booth. He shakes his head and holds up a hand. “It’s fine, son. Take it as a gift from me. You need your money to get back home.”

Eddie nods, folding his arms and hiding the money below his armpit. This man may be looking at him like a he’s child, but Eddie is far from needing another paternal figure. “I’m a grown man,” he voices, hissing at himself to stop shaking. “I’ll make it just fine. Really. I appreciate you coddling me in my time of weakness, but I’m ready to collect myself.”

“Let me at least walk you back to the train station,” James insists, his pale blue eyes permanently furrowed in an expression of concern.

Holding his ground, Eddie rubs his elbow, grating his bottom lip with the flat of his worried teeth.

“Okay,” he agrees quietly. He’s never been this unsure.

Leaving all the vividness of the world behind for the damp, muted colors of the asylum was hard as fuck. But it is even harder to come back and see that the outside is tainted by his time spent in there. The world is leeched. It is empty.

Or maybe that’s just him.

°

He doesn’t need an electrode poked at his brain to remember the night he was brought there.

It started with the police, who handed him off before he even saw the inside of a prison cell. Well. It had really started with a dinner invitation.

He’d handwritten the card that called his neighbors to a meal, taking full care to etch a water-colored rose around the script. He’d known Charles and Mary-Grace from when he first moved into the neighborhood. They’d all gone out dancing a handful of times, but even through the shades, the wife was a regular gardener and the husband was always coming and going in his car.

“Thank you for coming,” he had greeted them at the door, an apron tied at his waist and oven mitts tucked neatly beneath his arm. He offered a warm smile, shaking their hands and welcoming them into the house. “It’s been far too long for neighbors to go without seeing one another.”

Their old kitchen had been a small, warm thing. It was always scented with the spices that Carmen stacked in the revolving rack, or the sweet flowers she cut to fill their glass vases. The decorations were her own touches as well; she liked soft, buttery yellows and scandalous cherry-reds. Even Eddie’s own cheeks had a tendency of blushing to such a color given her prowess for bold statements.

As Mary-Grace sat herself at his dining table, she smoothed her blonde hair and looked around. “Oh, is Carmen not joining us?” she inquired, clasping her hands delicately over the tablecloth.

The juxtaposition of her mannered conduct made Eddie’s nose wrinkle in disapproval, but he masked it by turning to the oven. “Ah, sadly not,” he informed, pulling on his mitts and reaching in to remove the heaping tray of food. A large mound of beef swam in an oily, simmering bath of carrots and celery. “She is quite busy over at her mother’s, the poor soul. Left this fool all alone to burn the roast.”

Even then, the lies had a way of mangling into shapes he could believe without question. Each falsehood was brimming with such vibrancy that he never needed to rehearse his stories.

Mary-Grace nodded solemnly, looking amiably up at the two men.

“Kindness is important in a wife,” Charles filled the silence, slipping a soft wink in the direction of his own.

“Yes…” Eddie agreed, glancing down at her. He narrowed his eyes and cocked his head slightly, noticing the moment that she became discomforted by the scrutiny. “And how would you rank fidelity, Charlie?” he asked, turning to face him with a crooked smile.

The white-blonde turned back at him with a quizzical look.

Eddie set the platter down on the stovetop, pulling the oven mitts off his hands. “I rather hope it falls on a lower rung,” he clicked, voice hard as though coated in enamel. He turned back and leant against the countertop, his body slack as he flicked his hand into his breast pocket and emerged with a stack of photographs.

One by one, he flipped them through the air and let them land on the kitchen table, glossy sides facing up.

For every snapshot that landed, his chest felt a delicious twist of cruelty. Isn’t this what his father had done to him? Documented his most humiliating moments so that Eddie could never put them to rest, knowing that they forever existed as still life? It felt wonderful to show somebody else how _dreadful_ that felt.

A few of them were innocuous images, just Mary-Grace heading up her front stairs with various men. But as he laid more down, exposing images of undressed bodies peeking from behind the blinds of her window, the narrative began to click together, spreading a block of red up Charles’ neck.

“What is this?” he demanded harshly, pointing the outrage in Eddie’s direction.

“You can’t do that,” the wife shouted out at the same time, jumping up from the table. “You can’t take pictures through someone’s window.”

Eddie had laughed loudly, the sound like the whip being cracked against his vocal cords. “Really, now? _That’s_ the finer point of concern here?” He shot his eyes towards Charles, who was looking at him with disgust alight in his features. “You married a whore and you’re angry at me for having the gall to enligh-”

Charles punched him in the face.

His lip split and his nose bled, gushing red all down his face. He’d been in his 20’s then, young and hot-blooded, such that rage reared where pain should have been. Eddie whipped around and grabbed one of the knives out of the block, holding it defensively in the direction of the older man. Mary-Grace had let out a scream and backed up, knuckles turning white on the back of the chair.

Eddie turned back with the knife, diving for Charles’ hand.

He grabbed the male’s fingers and uncurled them, trying to force him to take hold of the weapon.

“My wife,” Eddie had thundered, spit and blood flying, fighting with every bit of strength to get Charles to take revenge of his wife, “Was good to me. She was kind and loyal. She was loving.” He breathed heavily out of his nose, wresting with the man’s grip. “She didn’t deserve to die. You wanna know why she died?”

He tried to yank Charles forward, ending up with the knife wrenched back into his hand alone. He whipped it through the air in the direction of Mary-Grace. “Because she was vocal,” he finished to her, nodding along with what he assumed was disbelief. “Because she was wily with her opinion, and made too many jokes, and said too many uncouth things.”

Eddie grabbed his head with both hands, screaming a sob of agony into the handle of the knife. “What kind of reason is that?” he begged crazily, grinding his temple into the wooden hilt. “It was a fucking impulse. A mistake.” His voice cracked, rising high. “And then,” he stuttered, jabbing the knife back in the direction of the girl, “There’s this _bitch_ , who deserves it. And I _will_ find everyone who deserves it. I will make up for what happened to her.”

He lunged forward and _this bitch_ cried out, thrusting the chair across the floor. She hit him in the knees, sending him toppling to the ground, and then rammed the steel of its feet into his side. Eddie forwent the knife to try to crawl back to his feet, but she fought back, digging it into him. It gave Charles enough of an advantage to jump him from behind, pinning him to the floor by his belly.

“Get the police,” he shouted to her, sending another box to Eddie’s skull.

When the officers came, they grabbed him by his wrists and put him into handcuffs, forcing him out of the front door. Mary-Grace was shaking and Charles was comforting her, as though nothing had changed between them. The uniformed men were opening up all the doors in his house, and eventually, they descended into the basement.

About an hour later, he heard it called in on the radio. In the next hour, the police tore him out of the back of their car and threw him into the arms of another group of men. They grabbed him around the eyes and blindfolded him, dug their nails into his arms until he stopped trying to rip out of their grasp. They’d thrown him into the back of a van where he clanked around for days.

…

Eddie squints against the peaking morning. Leadville is bleached by sunlight, the sky a solid blue lightness. It’s nothing that can warm his skin, especially not with these memories running around inside of his eyelids. The first night in the asylum was like nothing he’d ever known. The cold iron of the walls he beat himself stupid against. The loneliness of the darkness, when the wailing and heckling of the other prisoners began. Being forced to wrap his arms around himself and realize all of the things he’d done.

Finally, he’s able to make out where they’re headed. He can see the train station platform just a little bit down the road.

James is walking straight towards it, but Eddie stops short, his eyes caught on something else.

“Wait,” he says briefly. He looks through the window of a shop, darkened by dust. Rows upon rows of heads look back out at him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> me, a writer who wants to stay true to Eddie's character and humanize him, while also NOT sending a message that I agree with his ragingly misogynistic and transphobic character traits: sometimes he really do be like that tho.


	5. chapter five. change. weight. identity.

Dirt clings to the soles of his feet like the sandy grit of an Afghanistani terrain. There are sudden, sharp sounds that dive out of the forest, like a branch snapping under the weight of a larger brush animal or a frog plunging into the water.

After another broken-up sleep cycle, it doesn’t matter how innocuous the sounds are. All of them make him electric with brutality. He hears the cry of a bird and turns with his fists up, teeth patted back and ready to lunge. No more men. No uniforms. Nothing to go up against- just birds calling to one another. And he’s lost the road.

Chris sees a scaled quail take off from a bush nearby, erupting from a shelter of dry leaves. He quickly moves towards it, treading into the thicket.

Peering down into the shrubbery, he finds its nest hidden there, a swirling circle spun out of twigs and leaves. There are a handful of eggs in it, and nestled even further, a tiny hatchling with raw skin and tufts of growing fuzz. It nestles blindly, opening its delicate mouth in search of food.

Carefully, Chris reaches in and plucks out one of the eggs, rolling it between his forefinger and thumb before he holds it up to the sun. Inside of the shell he can see a huge black mass filling the interior, so he places the egg back into the nest and pulls out another. Squinting into this one, he makes out the shadow of an embryo, just a round blemish in the transparent egg, but he’s always had a strong stomach. He selects a small rock from the ground and cracks open the top of the egg, leaning back to drink its contents.

When that eggshell has been emptied, he eats the raw contents of two more. The broken remains get scattered into the underbrush, far away from the nest.

A brief calm placates his need to stomp through the forest in search of a threat. With a steadying breath, Chris crosses his legs on the forest floor, closing his eyes. The landscape is different enough, and yet, he’s begun to fade back into Afghanistan. The sounds and sights are dissimilar, but having his purpose broken down to just-fucking-survive is a louder force than the consistency of the earth. He has to remind himself that these circumstances are different. He’s acting for himself now, not a superior barking orders, and that can mean whatever he wants it to mean.

The soldier scoops his hand into the interior of the nest, dipping his palm underneath the small fluff of a baby quail. He brings it out into the open, cupping it in his nest-sized hand.

The tenderness of its pulse beats against the flat of his thumb. It has a soft but powerful heartbeat. Chris presses the pad of his thumb deeper into its neck, evoking a tiny sound from its mouth.

Does this kind of bird imprint? he wonders, trying to name all the senses that are being acted on by this delicate piece of nature. And then, birds don’t get ripped out by their mothers when they return to the nest stinking of human touch, right?

A stronger man would be able to suffer that question and crush this creature’s trachea between his fingers before he risked letting it be abandoned by its mother… either to protect his humanity or send a torch-borne message to his own sensitivity. But the residue of mercy still coats his hand. When everything is scorched to the bottom, he’s still on his knees with his elbows in the ashes. A stronger man would let himself burn quiet.

Some of them were amazingly quiet.

Some of them told him everything he needed to know.

His fellow soldiers had favorite techniques and tools that they reached for, but he had his fists. This is what you do: you start by swinging punches when they’re hanging upside-down from the ceiling; you kick their ribs in when they’re zip-tied to a chair. They are meat with mouths and you use your skin as a weapon.

After that, when they’ve had all the comfort of the primitive violence their bodies were built to expect, you introduce devices more delicate and precise than the pulse of a bird inside your fist.

Iron pokers that pierce one or two nerves at a time. Metal clamps that twist the metacarpals and phalanges in two different directions. Slivers of metal torn from carpentry tools that you slowly force in after pulling down the lower lid of their eyes. These are a brand of agony that the body was not designed to tolerate. Why break a bone when you can splinter it piece by piece?

If he were a stronger soldier, he would have tortured them until he was satisfied with the answers and then tossed them into the desert, or else passed them on to make sure every drop of information was wrenched out. Instead, he would have mercy. He would take their head in both his hands, fit his fingers into the grooves of their jaws, and break their necks.

Chris opens his hand suddenly, certain he has crushed the bird in his fist.

The animal breathes regularly, asleep inside the warmth of his palm. He quickly drops it back into its nest, staggering to the ground and running a hand through his shorn blonde hair. A great sigh releases from inside him, sending some of the panic out with it.

They never tortured in their own camp. It wasn’t good juju or whatever the fuck they called it, to mingle their sleeping quarters and mess halls with the screams of war prisoners. It was always done off-site, a couple of miles away from their base in Bagram, in a hollowed-out prison that no longer operated.

And for that reason, Chris had not been surprised when he woke up, his head spinning, locked in Mount Massive asylum. He had expected fate to catch up with him eventually… he just never thought it would be the law that got him. He thought maybe a group of Middle Eastern vindicators would throw a bag over his head and shit on him, once for every person he’d taken away from them.

He still doesn’t remember much about the first few nights when he was brought in. His mind hadn’t been working properly. Every fiber that connected his spinal cord to his brain stem had gotten shut off, and it stayed like that from the time he started at Spindletop to when he woke up in the strange hospital bed.

But he distinctly remembers the moment that Eddie had crawled into his life.

It had been as dark as the inside of his eyelids when he felt the shape scamper across the bed he was lying in. Chris’d strained his eyes against the blackness all around him, his body was too heavy to move.

The figure had clawed up the bedsheets, seeking him. Its fingers had fitted around his features the same way he too had done a hundred times, but instead of snapping his neck and ending his anguish, they didn’t _stop._ That set of dull-ended needles tore gently at his face, pulling at the flesh of his cheeks, scraping at the corners of his mouth.

“Help me,” Eddie had moaned, scratching until he felt his face start numbing. “Please help me.”

Something about that had jarred Chris back to life. His senses all flared back into motion.

“What the fuck?” he had breathed out, lurching violently away. The action made him realize his hands were shackled to the sides of the bed, holding him prisoner to the mattress he was lying on.

He shot his eyes around the perimeter of the room, making out details with the help of a dark, blue light tapering in from a grimy window. He was in an enormous room with rolling hospital beds and sleeping bags spread out all over. The silhouettes of other prisoners (patients?) were there, too, slouched on their sides, asleep, or wailing quietly against the wall.

Those surroundings had only ignited his instincts further, and he fought to tear himself from the bindings on both sides. The leather straps held strong regardless of how forcefully he tried to rip his wrists out of them.

“Please,” Eddie had wailed again, his voice slipping into higher, louder pitches. “You just came in this week. Do you remember where the entrance was? Do you remember how to get out? Please _tell_ me.”

The double doors to the left of the room had swung open at that moment. Two workers in uniform emerged from the light of a hallway.

Eddie’s face had been illuminated then, the whites of his eyes flashing up in fear, his black hair splayed all over his face. His fingers had gone limp, curling into themselves, and he was crawling back the way he came before they even stepped foot into the open space.

The other patients buckled at the light, wailing. One screamed and flattened himself into the floor as the two guards stomped in.

Scurrying across the floor, Eddie got as far as his mat before a baton was whipped open and cracked flat against his front, sending him crumpling against the wall. The sudden violence had made Chris rear up, trying to wrest himself from his bindings. He opened his mouth to demand an order when he realized it was clamped with a harsh, metal appendage. The distraught patient had been trying to claw it off him.

He bit down as hard as he could, feeling his teeth grind against the solid bar. He let out an angry growl of frustration when nothing worked to free him.

“How many fucking times,” the male guard had seethed, his nightstick held warningly over Eddie’s body, “Do I have to tell you to stay in your lane, Gluskin?”

He jerked his hand forward through the air, stopping shy of causing any damage, but Eddie had grabbed himself around the stomach protectively on impulse, a whimper fleeing past his tightened lips. The guard had laughed, tucking the baton away. “Thought so. And you-” He walked over to Chris’ bed, whacking a fist against the sturdy frame. “You’ve already caused enough trouble. Do not make me come back here again.”

Chris couldn’t remember what this man referred to, much less conjure up an escape route.

And none of this made any sense to him. He knew brutality like it was welded to his knuckles, but this wasn’t inflicting suffering to get anything. It was just a form of punishment. Maybe no one would have believed him, but despite all he’d seen, he’d never seen it used like this. Not for this purpose.

A stronger man, in that moment, would have revolted anyways. Would have asked to be beaten until he understood what it felt like. Would have used that opportunity to become every one of his victims, and then pray to God that he could claim catharsis by the end of it.

But as the patient who had begged him for help lay broken on the floor, he was nothing short of grateful that it hadn’t been him.

…

It took a while, but Chris got good at the asylum.

Because if nothing else, he was good at obeying authority. He could turn his morals to the side in favor of having a command cut clearly through the gray spaces. But his rage never completely burned away.

Even now, as he stumbles exhaustedly through the forest, unable to locate the main road, he feels anger lighting his way. There are welts up and down his back from being beaten- sometimes him deserving of it, like when he tried to attack the three sweet nurses checking his vitals, and sometimes not, such as when he was deemed disobedient for not eating when his stomach was too sick for it. There are scars from blades and singes from burns up and down the length of him.

And his brain. His brain is torn to pieces at the things they showed him. The things they told him.

No one had enough kindness to meet him in the night and rip his head from his neck.

But sometimes Eddie would sneak over to him and tell him how to survive. He gave Chris the tricks he needed to please certain guards, to charm some of the rounding nurses. If they could get away with it, they’d talk to each other through the particularly troublesome nights. They would search each other’s wounds and try to make sure they didn’t get infected.

If Eddie was in a particularly generous mood, sometimes he’d share his stockpile of pills with him. And if Chris was feeling particularly grateful, he would share his tongue in return.

He wants to touch Eddie with his hands.

He wants to see his face in the sunlight.

He wants to steal a car and drive back to Texas, get his machine gun, and then blast the guts out of everybody who’s ever fucking touched him in a way that did him harm. He wants to tread through a carpet of their intestines, wade up to his ankles in gore, and head up the stairs to kill more of them. He wants them to hear him coming. He demands to watch them cower into the corners and beg for their lives.

When he’s done, there will be no more fists to fear the intention of. The delicacy of the small creatures will win out over these disgusting, ass-backwards mass corporations, and this world will be safe for all the creatures scrambling over his bed to beg for help. For all the birds asleep in their nests.

He stomps heavily into the forest, walking in the wrong direction of the road.


	6. chapter six. a dusty pathway.

Eddie creaks into the shop, the bell above the door rattling out a muted chime.

It’s a tailor shop, but from the looks of it, their clothing is designed for business-formal circumstances. Racks of clothing populate the interior, along with stacks of leather shoes and mannequins or busts dollied in sharp attire. Some of the articles are hung to indicate they’re ready for purchase, though there are also jackets with rips in their seams and dresses safety pinned at the hems.

He walks carefully through the stuffy enclosure, passing his fingertip idly over clothing waiting to be altered. He nudges the mouth of a pair of sewing shears that sit on a table, surrounded by measuring tape. It’s all very familiar to him, though in a distant way. It stirs an impulse through a dusty pathway, moving slowly and inefficiently through the degraded axon.

James enters behind him, treading onto the beige carpet. The room smells of leather and must, crammed so full of items that every sound gets immediately absorbed.

Their presence prompts a sudden movement behind the cash register. Without it, Eddie would not have noticed the man sitting silently at the desk. He has deeply brown skin and is covered in the kind of wrinkles that harden with age. He looks for a moment at Eddie but then cuts through him to address James.

“What’s wrong with him?” he asks in a clear-cutting voice. He doesn’t have a noticeably heavy accent but the words themselves seem weighted somehow. Eddie can infer that he doesn’t use his tongue flippantly.

He clears his throat to respond but James quickly steps in on his behalf. “Hello Samuel,” he says evenly. “Long story short, we’re looking for something simple a guy can wear on a train ride home.” He glances at Eddie for approval. These two men are technically on the same standing, but James appears significantly intimidated by the other storeowner.

Samuel doesn’t move from his stool, just looks Eddie up and down. “You ought to have brung him to the gift shop,” he dismisses.

James winces slightly. “C’mon, twenty five dollars for a t-shirt with a mining cart on it?”

With a shrug, the man answers, “Simple comes with its own price.”

A visible tinge of anger catches up with James’ eyes. “Maybe if our businesses weren’t so selective with who they turn away, this town wouldn’t be in the danger it is.”

Eddie has a strong inkling that he isn’t meant to hear this. He sees Samuel glance over at him, taking in his face this time, then lifts the back of his hand to flick it to the right. “Head down the stairs, boy,” he finally offers. “The undershirts and trousers we use for fittings will suit you well enough.” Then he turns back to James, giving him an unamused look.

As James approaches the cash register, Eddie turns to find the carpeted set of stairs dug into the corner of the room. He glances once more around the store before approaching them and padding down carefully. The sound of the two arguing in hushed scowls disappears into the rug.

The wood beneath the carpet bends under his foot as he descends below the shop, entering a room that looks even more like a warehouse than the upper level. The space is much more condensed, however, leaving fabrics piled atop one another. He peers through a curtain of wire hangers, illuminated only by a window at the back of the room. It allows the last chance for a dusty, sepia-toned light to enter the basement before the walls plunge below ground level.

In its beams sits a woman, settled in front of a sewing machine. She works her slender fingers through the needle, working a pant leg through its teeth. Her focus on the task doesn’t waver until she lets up on the pedal, fussing with the new seam. She readjusts and feeds it back through.

The image pierces through him, a white-hot spike that melts in the center of his chest.

It reminds him of his mother, with her long dark hair sweeping down her shoulders, at work on a new piece. She made all of Eddie’s clothing growing up. Even the suit that he wore to his last dance in high school. It was worth more than anything they owned, and for once, his father didn’t have the balls to look him in the eye.

The woman lets out a distracted hum. The personal connection is too much for Eddie to digest all at once. He shifts his weight, making the boards under his heel groan.

The machine whirrs suddenly, causing her to pull her hand back. Her concentration broken, she finally notices him standing there. She looks at him like he’s bad luck.

“Can I help you?” she asks plainly, her voice carrying its own tinge of an accent that’s both melodic and severe. Her fingernail fits into the compartment on the side of the machine, seeking the bobbin case. The empty reel pops out of it, escaping to roll across the table.

Eddie steps closer, snatching the cylinder before it falls to the floor. He eyes the spool on her wheel, matches it to the jet black thread on the table, and takes it upon himself to begin weaving the thread around it.

“Hm,” he undertones, “Samuel sent me down. On the search for undershirts. Maybe pants?” he adds courteously, glancing up to inspect her face. Her black skin has been dusted at the cheeks, giving the impression that she blushes in gold. Eddie somehow doubts she frequents the act of blushing.

Viewing him with purpose, the woman slides back her chair. She gives the stitch selection dial an indiscriminate twist before she rises. “Can you sew?” she questions.

Eddie weaves the thread around a few more times before grabbing a pair of fabric scissors and trimming off the excess. “My mother taught me.” He feels apprehensive saying it, as if it might not be true anymore. His mother taught him a lot of things that he sloughed off immediately after her death. There had been nobody to impress with his dainty manners and skills at that point, no part of the world calling for a man to have those talents.

“Then sew,” she instructs him, tapping a set of fingers onto the table. “And I will find you something to wear.”

He hesitates, pinching the bobbin ruminatively between two fingers. Then he slides into the seat, examining the pair of pants she’s working on. It’s immediately obvious that she’s just making them bigger by adding a panel of fabric to the sides. He puts the bobbin back in its case and lines everything up again.

As he turns the dial back to the stitch she was working with, his mind hovers back over his mother. His body feels different in this chair, in front of this machine, toe pressing down on the pedal. He’s larger than he’s ever been in this setting, with movements that are forceful, ungraceful.

He’s hit with an unexpected flurry of resentment for his mother. She cultivated his softness when he needed to make the world eat shit. She kept him smooth around the edges and it had only given more for his father to grab onto when they raped him.

He jolts suddenly when he notices the tailor leaning over his shoulder. His fingers spasm for a moment, but he calms himself and runs the needle smoothly through the fabric. He throws his eyes over his shoulder, catching the moment when she nods in approval.

“You recognized the stitch and completed it with competence,” she states. “You know what you’re doing.”

The statement is flat, appraising, not really a compliment. But it isn’t spoken with secondhand embarrassment on his behalf or outright disdain. Perhaps this world has indeed changed since he’s been removed from it.

He lets up on the pedal as he nears the hem. “Did you find something that will fit?” he asks, glancing at her empty hands.

“How about a job?” she proposes suddenly.

She must notice how far this puts Eddie off guard because she sighs, her voice dropping its defensively authoritative tone for a sincere one. “My father refuses to hire extra help. He thinks it will ruin the values of a family-run business. But since my aunt moved away and my brother found something with a salary, I can’t keep up with the work.”

Eddie folds his hands on the desk, staring at the sewing machine needle. “I don’t live in the area.”

“I can tell,” she answers, eyes gleaming, “But you look like you’ve made trouble somewhere. Maybe you want to wait it out?”

He hasn’t had a job in a long time. Folding prison jumpsuits doesn’t count.

“I don’t have anywhere to live,” he suggests, an eyebrow up. The seamstress mirrors the action, though her gesture carries the mischievous air of a challenge. She may not blush but she seems to enjoy instituting subtle games.

“Would you like one?” she grins, leaning back and crossing her arms. “I’ll only take a little bit out of your paycheck for it. The clothes will cost more, honestly.”

The idea turns over in his mind. “I have a fear of responsibility.” He smiles sharply when she lets out a laugh; she knows that he has already agreed.

The woman turns back to the stacks of clothing, picking out a medium-sized white t-shirt and pair of gray slacks. She places them on the desk, a little smile on her lips. “The extent of your responsibility is ironing that new hem until it disappears. Allow me to go argue with my father on your behalf.” She starts to head up the stairs but then turns around suddenly. “Oh,” she adds. “My name is Lorenna.”

“Eddie,” he purrs back.

°

four weeks later

Chris tears through a thicket of trees, slashing the leaves out of his face. The branches whip back at him, cutting harsh red lines against his body. It makes his rage heavier. His feet lighter. His fists sharper.

This is the point at which his mind should swallow his body whole:

After subsisting off the skeletal bodies of wild plants, after being licked down by insects that make a feast of him, after being combed thoroughly by all the freezing nights curled up in the dirt, his mind should have booted him the fuck out. But he’s here. He’s sharp. He’s focused.

He’s ready.

They have taken everything from him.

His reputation was shredded when they slapped the label _psychotically homicidal_ on him, and that itself made a fissure between him and his men. They’ve used every tool they could to strip his morals from him as though he were bark. But they never succeeded. Never.

Until now. With Eddie truly gone from his life, he is ready to show them exactly how psychotically homicidal he was made to be.

His eyes glow with purpose.

He has never felt loss cut this deeply into him. But at the same time, he’s never felt so purposeful. These are the enemies that he desperately tried to locate in Afghanistan but could never find. This is a cause that he can go down with.

When he jumped from the window, he told himself that he might never find Eddie again.

He didn’t brief himself on the fact that each step, blindly wandering through the wilderness in search of him, would wake something deeper. Something that meant he couldn’t sit down and cry over lost love. A monster this angry eats all his love.

… But he still feels it. At night, he still begs that he will find Eddie alive, holed up somewhere in this never-ending forest. Meanwhile, another part of him profoundly hopes that he’s dead. Because if he is not here to keep Chris grounded, then there is nothing stopping him from becoming completely unhinged.

If he deserves nothing else, Chris Walker deserves to finally come unhinged.

°

Eddie pulls at the cuffs of his suit, flatting down the black hem that coils around his wrists. He glances through the store windows one final time before locking the door and turning off the light, leaving himself alone in the small building.

The past month has been a lot of taking measurements, doing menial repairs, matching fabrics, and running errands. The money is good, he guesses. He still isn’t completely sure how to compare the value of the dollar to what it used to be, but then, he doesn’t have much to spend it on. He’s just eating diner food and saving up for when he can get out of here.

With no desire to explore the town, he spends most of his days in the shop. He’s learned how to use a computer to order stock. (On his own, when no one was looking). He has started to get to know the residents of the city, learning how to talk once again in charming tongues. And above all else, Samuel has stopped treating him like a burden. Now he treats him like he’s nothing, which is a genuine improvement.

Most of his time has been spent on building his strength back up.

Only a few weeks out of the asylum and the color in his cheeks has returned. His body is filling back in with food, though maybe a little too quickly for his tastes. Thoughts of leisure pop into his mind once in a while, and he’s actually considered pursuing them once or twice.

Eddie walks to the right of the room and peers up.

A rope hangs from above, dangling shallowly into the shop. He reaches up and grabs it, pulling down the wooden staircase that leads to his living quarters.

He climbs up into the tiny, hidden attic. All that can fit in the enclosure are his bed, a small vanity with a chair, a thin closet, and a little bit of leg room. The walls are covered in old newspaper, leaving behind a wet, papery smell.

Tiredly, he closes the secret stairway back up and sits onto his bed. He shrugs off the suit jacket, letting it land on his bed, and then thinks of Chris for the fiftieth time this week. The wrinkled neckline of his white button-down sits messily against his collars; he places a tentative set of fingers to the hollow of his throat, testing the sensation of his own skin.

Now that he’s safe, he wants to lie down on the bed and sink into the reserve of memories. There are so many pieces to sort through- Chris with his arms wrapped around Eddie when he was scared, Eddie trailing his palms over the blonde’s thighs after the guards had just finished a full round.

But it hurts him too much. The tenderness of his own skin mixed with the hot, biting thought of Chris rotting in the forest is excruciating.

Eddie passes his eyes over the closet. There are a few clothes in there, but it’s mostly piled high with food. His hoard is made from vending machines and corner store packages. Sometimes he forgets to clean things out before they go bad. He never really takes from it, but it’s comforting to have, just in case.

A bit of skin gets caught between his fingernails. Eddie stops scratching idly at his throat and takes in a steadying breath, centering himself. How does he successfully remind himself that they’re not here? That they’re not going to come and check on him? They have photos of his dad and his uncle fucking him in his childhood bed. They decide where he sleeps and if he eats, if he gets to participate in a study on the replication or trauma or how prolonged starvation affects memory.

Eddie rolls off the bed, hitting the floor forcefully with his chest. His breaths come out too fast, sending him into panic, and he tries to ground by resting on the hard floor.

After he’s feeling better, he places two palms on the wooden boards and peeks underneath the bed.

The man he caught is still there.

His hands are tied behind his back by rope, and the same knot is repeated around his ankles. Thick stretches of duct tape are wound around his mouth so he can’t make a sound. He’s quiet like he’s sleeping, but when Eddie looks at him, his eyes are wide, staring back at him with fear.

Eddie leaps into a crouching position and grasps the male by his shirt.

He starts thudding his feet and moaning through the tape as soon as Eddie grabs him, but it’s pointless. The shop is closed. This man was grabbed randomly. Nobody knows where to look for him, and there’s no one idling around here.

Eddie drags him out on his back, heaving at the heaviness. Getting him up here today was a nightmare. Getting him down will be another one.

Swinging a leg over the man’s torso, Eddie sits down to restrain him, throwing his hands around his throat. His thumbs dig into the male’s neck, feeling the frantic tremble of his heart beat. It feels so fucking good. The euphoria of being in control again rivals everything he once thought to be pleasurable.

That’s when he feels himself start to cry.

His hands, curled tightly around the man’s neck, grow limp as he starts sobbing, tears falling onto the other’s face.

He can’t be doing this.

This violence is unwanted. He’s been given the chance to shake off all those years and start again. This whole thing was a mistake. Tracking him behind the store and lugging him in through the back door was calculated, but it was an impulse he should have restrained. He wasn’t thinking. He had just wanted a reminder that he wasn’t the one being tortured anymore.

He lets out an angry cry and crushes down on the man’s windpipe, choking the life out of him. It’s painful and cruel, but it is nothing compared to all of the things Eddie had planned to do to him.

He will find a way to get the body down and then he’ll try again. He'll try to do better.

The sharp edge of this life will settle into a boring, rounded corner. He will find a way to get their hands off him without pressing down harder on someone else’s windpipe.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry that writing takes me forever sometimes. I've been getting into bouts of sadness about outlast's fandom having died down significantly. my mind refuses to let go. chris/eddie has thrived way longer than any of my other ships, and my passion won't settle down... <3 maybe one day there will be more content that'll draw people back. just a note.


	7. chapter seven.  twin skins.

_2006_

The asylum hangs heavy, especially at night.

You can feel the suffering in the halls; it is a swollen, wet ghost that reaches out for you when you walk. It is made of echoes and fingernails that know when you’re there. It just wants to know you feel it: the weight of the bodies that have been forced to fall apart inside these walls. But Eddie is suffering among them. He cannot open his eyes.

He hears a loud sigh cross the infirmary.

“Eddie,” the voice reasons, false pacification in the doctor’s tone, “Come on, now. It’s already eleven o’clock. How do you think my staff feel about being kept so late?” Frozen in the corner of the room, he doesn’t move. Doesn’t open his eyes. “Let’s move it along, okay?”

In the next minute, two pairs of arms reach underneath his own, forcefully dragging him to his feet. Their fingers pinch into his skin, handling him like he is a doll meant to be flung around.

His eyes shoot open, forcing him to take in the details around him. There’s blood smeared across the white-and-green tiled floor… so much of it that they had to lock the wheels of the rolling hospital bed into place. They could easily have easily strapped him into it for this, but they chose not to. They want to make him participate.

When the two nurses release him roughly, his bare feet skate around on the slippery ground. He doesn’t know what they were doing before they brought him in here two hours ago. None of that blood has come from this session.

“Is this-” he tries madly, scrambling for his voice. It’s hoarse and wasted at the bottom of his throat. “Is this covered in the Hippocratic oath?” His voice cracks, too many pitches high to be taken seriously.

The man in scrubs continues to tilt his head at him like he’s speaking to a child. “We’re not medical doctors,” he says derisively, “We are scientists. Now look at the screen.”

Eddie’s lip snarls, a useless gesture on a face composed of sad eyes and a fearfully quivering mouth. But he can’t stop himself. His eye wanders helplessly back to the projector that beams a picture onto the wall. The video is paused, but the doctor clicks it back on the second Eddie looks.

When Eddie whips his head away in disgust, the man makes an irritated sound, clicking a button to rewind back to the beginning.

“I’ve been extremely patient with you,” he clicks out angrily, “Considering I am corresponding with a man responsible for thirteen deaths.”

Grabbing his arm, Eddie covers himself protectively. His upper body is bare, after having been stripped down and hosed earlier in the evening. Now he wears only a pair of long pants, the bottoms of which are crusted by the blood of a stranger. When his teeth chatter loudly, he doesn’t know the exact source.

“Please,” he whispers, not strong enough to make another dash for the corner of the room. He doesn’t want to be touched by those men. He knows if he is asked to look again, he will. “Don’t make me remember that.”

The doctor gives another sigh, but this time, begins to level with him. “You are one of the few patients who we can properly try this with,” he explains. “Do you remember working with Professor Perez?” Eddie doesn’t nod, just stares on with glassy eyes. “She shared your case with me and the indications are _stark_. Trauma clearly has an impact on behavioral misconduct, of course, but it made me wonder, what about now? What about re-exposure to the exact trauma? Will that drive the same behaviors as they did following the event?”

There are too many elaborate words looped around and around that explanation for Eddie to understand it, but for some reason, simply having one… helps. Or maybe it just finally beats him down.

He blinks deadly, and when he opens his eyes again, they are pointed back at the screen.

The overhead projector reactivates. It spits the image out, starting in the living room, where Eddie’s father starts taking off both their clothing.

He winces but watches guardedly, compressing himself to as small a shape as possible. The anatomy of their bodies carries a prolonged shock factor, disturbing him tremendously when he does not avert his eyes. He is naked all of the time in here. They are all naked a lot of the time. But it never feels like this.

Then again, none of them are ever below the age of puberty.

“How do you have this?” he asks after failing to make his eyes go bleary.

“It was on the market.”

He really had wanted to make it through the whole thing. But at that sentence, his body crumbles. He wraps his arms fitfully around his chest and buries his head into them, breath coming out in broken, rapid gasps.

There’s silence for a moment, and then with all the mercy of god, the humming of the projector switches off. “Just take him back,” the man resigns.

They pull him back through the hallway. This time, he reaches out for the walls to witness him. He begs for even a ghost to know what he is feeling.

The two guards push him into the common room, submerging him in the blue-black light coming in through the giant window at the back.

For a moment he just stands there in the doorway, feeling heavier than he has ever been. The pictures were bad enough. The _affidavits_ were bad enough. Now his eyes are raw and inside out, his skin butchered by the prickly feeling of violation, sticky and needle-thin all over him. He wants to fall onto his bed but another patient has buried himself into it while Eddie was gone.

“Kid,” a soft voice calls to him.

Eddie steps into the room, blinking disconnectedly. His hands feel like odd balls weighing down the ends of his arms. There is nothing to hold together all of the pieces of him. There is no more centralized paste to keep everything attached.

“You came back,” the voice whispers again, closer.

Eddie sweeps his eyes over the floor to find Chris leaning against the back wall, a page from a magazine rested on his knee. He reads discreetly in the light of the window, his features illuminated delicately from the top-down.

The sight of him hits Eddie with a wave of gratitude, so hard that he drops immediately onto the floor. It is a burst of love so intense and out of place that he feels his chest tighten again. It is the antithesis of everything he was feeling a moment ago, when nobody existed except for the people in that room. The transition gives him whip-lash.

Chris jumps forward the second Eddie hits, moving from a relaxed position to readied with his knee bent and his hands on the ground.

“What happened to you?” he asks anxiously, rising a hand off the floor that’s nervous to actually touch him.

Folded over his knees, Eddie pulls his arms back in, tearing at his elbows with his nails. “Chris,” he stumbles, his voice wet, “Please… let me sit against you.”

The blonde watches him steadily for a moment but then lets his face soften. “You can,” he responds in a hushed tone, rolling back against the wall.

Eddie scuttles into the space between his legs, putting his back to Chris’ chest. It’s closer than they’ve ever been to each other. There have been countless nights where they spoke back and forth until daybreak. They’ve even thrown a couple fists at each other, shared some hot blood in that way. But he’s never laid his body against the other’s and felt Chris wrap his arms around him.

“Why did they keep you for so long?” Chris asks again, his chest vibrating against Eddie’s back when he speaks. “What did they want?”

The comfort of Chris feels wrong. His instincts are telling him to fight his way out of this feeling, run as far as he can. He has never gone for warmth when trying to escape the brutal cold. He’s always aimed to just be colder than it.

“Too much,” he whispers back in a shaky voice. “And they got all of it. They always get all of it.”

Chris puts a hand to his face. It’s a testing kind of touch, just the drag of the back of his knuckles below Eddie’s chin. It makes his entire body light up.

“You were in here long before I was,” Chris muses in a low rumble. “You showed me how to survive. I started off raging at all of them and it… it doesn’t work. They will always have more men, bigger weapons. So you have to take what they want and hide it somewhere they can’t get it. You showed me that, Eddie. That’s the only reason I’m still alive.”

Trembling, Eddie shifts against him, leaning his profile against Chris’ bicep. The feeling of love morphs with touch. “I am extremely surprised that I have any left,” he admits vaguely.

He turns his head up, twisting around to look at Chris’ face as he sits between the other’s legs. The movement gives Chris the opportunity to have his fingers shaken away from Eddie’s face. They don’t. Instead, he trails them slowly beneath Eddie’s jawbone.

Quietly, he lifts his legs from beneath him and places them on either side of Chris’ hips, sitting into his lap. He doesn’t think about the other patients that are stuffed into this space. He doesn’t try to estimate where in the rounds the guards are right now.

“I didn’t-” Chris murmurs distractedly, sliding his hands down Eddie’s side and stopping at his hips. There is a haze of warmth between them that’s making everything swim. Eddie shifts himself on Chris’ lap and feels a hardness press against him.

He puts two hands on Chris’ face and brings his eyes back up to meet him. “Do you want this?” His voice is quiet, afraid of rejection. He’s shaken by how good it feels. He’s been with women all his life, and they’ve never made his head spin like it is now.

“Eddie,” Chris says in a strangled voice, a breath coming up from deep in his chest. “I didn’t think you would want to. I didn’t think I should touch you.”

Nothing else in this wretched place makes any sense. But Chris is reason where there are no other laws. Chris’ kindness is not reflected in anything else.

He leans forward and kisses him, sliding his tongue into the heat of the other’s mouth.

Chris’ hands come up, grabbing his face. A fervor tumbles out of him now that this barrier has been crossed. He kisses Eddie with a desperation that no one has ever shown him before, and when Eddie’s mouth is swollen and gasping for breath, he leans into the crook of his neck and mouths hungrily over the flesh there too.

And it is the perfect place to hide the pieces of himself he does not want them to touch.

His compassion, his pleasure, his right to his own body: he uses that moment to hide it all inside Chris, so that when they come to pry him open for it, there won’t be anything to find.

°

Maybe this is why he’s so empty now.

Chris has everything. And Chris is gone.

Eddie turns back to Lorenna, who is shaking out her hair all over their stock. Her long, black locks are drenched from the sudden rainstorm, the brown paper bags at her side even worse off than she is. She laughs as she lets them drop onto the ground, wringing the water onto the floor.

“Do you think it will flood?” he asks with a smile, leaning back against the front desk. The rain has stopped pounding against the ceiling, settling on intermittently thumping through the gutter. He can see a river of rainwater rolling downhill on the asphalt outside.

“That’s what it’s good for,” she returns pleasantly, hefting the bags next to the cash register. “Soggy sandwich or soggy salad?”

He considers, then decides to execute a small kindness. He reaches for the sandwich in saran wrap instead of the salad that was protected by its little plastic dome.

“Are you going down to work?” he wonders, turning to face the counter. He places his elbows on its surface and begins unwrapping the meal.

“Yeah,” Lorenna responds, letting the top of her salad container pop open. “It’s a tall order to fill when somebody decides to have a formal gathering. These people, they are obsessed with cohesion. I think they can barely stand being different shapes.”

Eddie smiles, glancing over at her relaxed posture as she eats. She’s warmed up to him greatly over the past two months. More importantly, he’s warmed up to this town. He feels like he belongs here, when he heads down the street looking for people to talk with. The wit has come back to his tongue, painting his face in something more than just sickly-pretty. He is filling in as a person, working steadily inwards towards his empty core.

There have been no more bodies under his bed. His fingers have itched immensely, but he has allowed himself to burn away at the inside if it means resisting. He can fill slowly. He can fight the sickness that sits in the center of him.

His boss says something and laughs, catching his arm with the flick of her hand. He grabs it before it darts away, holding it in his grasp.

He gives her a look of defiance, his eyes catching the light, and then brings it up to his mouth to kiss her knuckles. He doesn’t feel anything- not a steady beat of love, not a rush of heated lust. But that’s okay. You are not supposed to.

She seems to eye him cautiously when he lets go, the laughter dissolving from her lips.

“I’m going to start with the dresses,” she tells him, boxing the salad back up. “Can you stay up here and take care of the shop?”

“Of course, darling.” He wanders over to the bench in front of the window, playing with the display of shoes and headpieces. The sound of Lorenna making her way down the stairs finds its way to him, leaving him alone again. The rain has stopped and a golden color has filled the evening sky. It turns the town a sheen that he has never seen it in before. He suddenly finds himself believing in all the Western frontier stories told about this place.

The shriek of a wheel screeching across the road wakes him from his thoughts. Somebody screams outside, loud enough for the sound to pass through the thick glass of the shop window.

Unthinkingly, Eddie runs out of the store, banging the door so hard against the wall that the bell falls off and thumps onto the ground. Even at its empty core, his body is ready to react. It is always ready.

In the middle of the street, a truck is parked askew, the passenger side door winged open.

Black tire tracks streak the ground, showing the car to have come to a haphazard stop. Off to the left, a woman lies in the middle of the road, splayed out on the pavement, looking wildly up at the truck.

Eddie follows her eyes in enough time to see the driver get ripped from the car. He yells out, holding defiantly onto the entryway, but is yanked from it and thrown to the ground. He rolls onto his back, clutching his arm, which has been twisted in the wrong direction.

There’s a blur of movement from behind the right side of the car. Eddie watches as someone from the town hall rushes out of the building, barreling down the steps. The assailant turns to meet the officer with his body poised for attack, abandoning the car. His shirt is as torn as his skin.

Eddie loses his breath. He takes a step forward.

Chris Walker lunges up the stairs as the officer reaches for the gun in his holster.

Chris smacks it out of his hand, barreling for his center. He butts his head between the man’s ribs, knocking his balance off enough to send a hook that brings him tumbling to the ground. How much combat training does Chris have?

He needs to yell out and get Chris’ attention, but he’s immobilized by shock. He is in disbelief that Chris is alive. Here. That he is finally able to fight back the way he always needed to. Even if it’s like this, brutal and dangerous, Chris is finally able to fight back. It is beautiful to see him out of chains.

Chris bends down and grabs the officer through his arms, heaving him up. Eddie doesn’t know what he’s going to do. Smash his head down on the steps of city hall? Heft him up and whip him into the bulletin board?

He never finds out. Chris lifts his head for just a moment. And he finds Eddie.

There is something wild and desperate and dark in his eyes. He drops the officer back onto the ground. When he does, the familiar blue color settles back into his iris, piercing in contrast with his skin caked entirely in dirt.

From behind, someone yells for him to get down. Chris drops to his knees without a question, holding his hands in the air. He gapes at Eddie. Eddie stares back.

Two officers grab him from behind and one of them shoves a taser into his back.

Chris goes down, falling flat on his face. His eyes roll up. They find Eddie. They don’t stop finding him.


	8. chapter eight. everything has claw marks on it.

Eddie paces the floor of the tailor shop, mouth buried into his knuckles.

Whatever he decide to do, he has to commit to it fast. People get passed from hand to hand once they’re with the police, moving coarsely (but quickly) through the system. It looked like Chris had been trying to put as much ground between his body and the asylum as he could, and if he hadn’t had his vision snagged on Eddie, he would have kept barreling straight out. Now they’re going to restring the hooks to his shoulders and drag him back into it.

No.

Not just him.

If they have Chris then they’ll have Eddie too.

He pulls on a coat from the nearest hanger, slinging the winter jacket over the long sleeves of his gray sweater. He bangs his way back through the door. People have a right to call him a lot of things, but even when grasping for insults, they can’t call him a runner.

Waiting for resolution has never brought him comfort. Maybe it’s because an old part of him believes that if he shows strength to the person toying with him, he will win them over. If he raises his head to expose the vulnerable skin of his neck, they will not get the delight of prying it out themselves.

Nights spent cowering in the corner of his cell, (and then when they stopped using cells, the common room) were abundant, but when it was time to go he always went. When his father coaxed him from his bedroom after school, he always followed.

He steps foot into town and the stillness that meets him is searching. A tame but freezing wind rolls through the street, carrying the chill of the approaching night. The golden hue left from the rainstorm has yielded to the darkening sky.

Eddie’s feet move without hesitation, though anxiety spins fervently throughout his body. Where has Chris been all this time? Was he looking for Eddie in the forest? Will he… will Eddie look different to him, in these clothes?

How much longer will he be allowed to wear these clothes?

The town is almost completely quiet again, if not for the cars rolling past. It’s been about an hour since it all happened, which is long enough for the three victims to be taken off the scene and the car moved, but still not long enough for Lorenna to emerge from her evening of work. She will come up the stairs and find the store unmanned. Or maybe somebody will enter after he was already meant to close and she will find out that way.

However it starts, it will end with her never seeing him again.

Despite all of it, Eddie knows that even if they question him, Chris won’t give away any information about him.

Chris had somehow taught himself how to bite down on the truth when they came at him. He had a secret method for keeping things in place when they tried to unmake his world. But that hollow, shriveled look in his eyes before he noticed him… Eddie thinks he finally saw where it all gets stored.

Through the main road and onto a side street, Eddie makes a quick inventory of the shallow things he’s accumulated here. They are details from a fictional life. Something he dreamed up while lying on the prison floor, gathering scraps of sleep.

He doesn’t have to go. He doesn’t have to put his wrists out for them to take. But if he doesn’t see Chris, then he will be consigning himself to an asylum of his own making.

Eddie reaches the police station, stopping at the double doors. It is an unimpressive building, built from glass and brick, but he already knows that. Whenever it’s visible from the main road, he creeps his eyes around the corner to check on it and make sure it hasn’t moved.

He doesn’t take in a breath before he enters. He needs all the breath he’s got.

When he walks through the doors, the officer at the front desk gives an immediate, “Oh, hey Eddie.”

Eddie looks over, steadying himself, and realizes he knows her. Of course he does. He knows just about everyone in this tiny fucking town- especially officers who go out of their way to know any new face that stays around for too long. He’s probably fixed the buckles on the woman’s shoes at some point.

All the same, being addressed amiably by somebody with legal power is not something that he is familiar with, nor is it a thing he particularly delights in. The last time he was on good terms with the police was when they arrested his father, and it had come in the form of cautiously sympathetic platitudes such as “you’re so strong / you’re a survivor.” And he really would rather not count a Murkoff guard asking for sex as good terms, though those were better than ones that demanded.

“Is Chris here?” he rushes, putting his hands down on the counter. There’s no glass curtain dividing him from the desk to the immediate right of the entrance, but to get anywhere else in the building, you need your ID.

“Oh, I don’t think we actually have a Chris. You probably meant Charles. What do you need him for?” She thumbs at the radio pinned to her collar.

Eddie realizes that she thinks he’s asking after an officer.

“No,” he clarifies, heart thrumming like that of a tiny bird. He is unable to hold it in his head that Chris is most likely in the walls of this building right now: they are being held in the same walls, together. Each time the thought pops back up, he jolts at it. “I watched him get arrested. Big guy, blonde hair.”

“His name is Chris?” she asks, writing it down as soon as he’s said it. He wants to smack himself. He always gives away too damn much. He has always been a hazard for everyone that moves closer to him.

“Yes. Can I see him?” Eddie dares, pulling in his breath. He leans back from the desk, pulling the fleece of the puffy jacket over his hands. He needs to quiet his chest. Nothing has clicked in her mind yet. She’s not calling to identify him. He just needs to get in to see Chris before they put everything together.

“How do you know him?” she usurps, pressing the pen back to the notepad. “We’ve been trying to get information on who he is, but he won’t say a thing.”

Eddie wants to smile. With pliers and barbed wire, they couldn’t get everything out of him. What do they expect to accomplish with words?

“He came for a fitting a few days ago,” Eddie lies, trying to reel back as much information as he worries he’s given away. “He was telling me that he’s a veteran, taking some time to find peace after serving. I think what happened might have been related to that. I’m really worried about him.”

She marks a few more things down, nodding. He had a good feeling about dropping his veteran status in there. Authority figures flock where they can nod their heads to a higher tier.

“We talked for a long time,” he goes on unprompted, “Please. I consider him a friend. It was shocking to see. Maybe I can help with getting him to talk.”

The officer puts down her pen, leaning forward to speak face-to-face. “I know that random acts of violence are hard to make sense of,” she sympathizes, “It really shows you what people can be capable of. But honestly, you don’t really know anything about this guy. There's something wrong. He has a way of acting that is very unpredictable.”

“ _Please,_ ” Eddie exclaims, shedding his composure.

It is too horrible to know that Chris is here and there is no way to find him. It feels like the building is reverberating with something sacred and yet he is unable to pursue the source. It is a low, dark, sharp-edged tone, and he is worried he might snap under its point if he doesn’t get any relief.

The officer considers him another moment, searching his expression. She then turns to mumble into her police radio. He hears her utter broken words about him, including the full fake name he is currently assuming. Hope pours into him a little more quickly than dread can drain it.

A staticy response is issued.

“Alright,” she finally bends, mouth pursed as though she’s been coerced into doing something she completely disagrees with. “If you can encourage him to talk, I say go for it.” She extends her arm at the same moment as a door buzzes open behind him. Eddie turns. A young male officer who he doesn’t know steps in front of the door, holding it open for him. He gives a curt nod that seems silly coming from his boyish face.

Eddie all-but melts as the tension drips off him, a candle burned into a puddle of wax, the wic still too hot to touch. He strides after the second officer, dipping through the door and into a short hallway.

“Chris, huh?” the uniformed boy reaffirms as he leads Eddie down a hall with a variety of doors, most of which are propped open. It’s a small station for a small town. The police force is tiny enough that each officer gets his or her own office space to nose through their computers in. “Did you get his last name too?”

Eddie swallows. “I don’t know.”

“Well,” the male warns him, “If anything seems off, I’ll take you right out. But it would be extremely helpful if you can get him to cooperate.” The words are awkward in his mouth. They’re exactly what an officer would say, but they clink around like bad mimicry.

They come to a stop in front of a door that is so unfortified it’s probably only used for the occasional drunk and disorderly citizen.

The officer buzzes it open, bringing them into a wide room with another desk at the front. In the back is a holding cell capable of containing maybe two prisoners at a time. Eddie takes an unthinkingly bold step forward. Chris is sitting on the bed slung from the wall, head buried in his arms.

He’s bigger. ... If that’s even possible.

Muscles travel up the sides of his arms and are visible through the thin fabric of his prison-issued pants. His body is still covered in dirt and blood, a combination that has formed an exoskeleton around him. Above it all, his hair has grown out longer, a light blonde where his head used to be completely shaven. Still, Eddie would still know him anywhere. There is a force wrapped around him that’s bigger than any change he could institute.

“We can provide the lieutenant spare clothing if you do not have it,” Eddie hisses impulsively to the officer. Chris has to have been living in the forest this entire time. He’s been walking around in these clothes for months.

The officer winces slightly, more than a little offended. “They told him they’d let him get cleaned up if he calmed down,” he defends, settling into the chair at the desk. “He never calmed down.”

Eddie darts his eyes forward, his pulse in his ears. The room slopes inward from police to prisoner, rolling all the power downhill. He feels it. He feels tremendously powerful, holding onto these roots of tension. The vines wrap around both of his wrists and he can yank the chain any way he wants. If he pulls too hard in either direction, he will unleash hell.

Instead, he strokes gently on it. He tries to find a delicate way to tell Chris that he’s here.

Eddie shrugs off his jacket and tucks it over his arms, embracing the soft bundle. He is… nervous. This feels like meeting somebody for the very first time. It’s almost like he’s been talking to a voice through a wall, corresponding with its soul, but is about to meet the flesh it belongs to. He is afraid Chris will not be able to place him.

“Chris,” he murmurs quietly to himself, walking nearer to the cell.

When he’s a few inches from the front of the bars, standing directly in front of the other, he bites his lip, urging the syllables back onto his tongue. “Chris," he undertones.

Chris raises his head, flexing his shoulders back. His blue eyes are rimmed by red, his face darkened by the mud that’s dried in patches all over his skin. He blinks, running his eyes up from Eddie’s feet to his fidgeting arms and then to his face.

Chris vaults to his feet. He grabs the bars of the holding cell, pressing himself into them.

“Eddie,” he gushes, an extended breath of relief twining through his voice. “I thought that was you. I _knew_ it was you.”

Eddie wants to take a step closer. He wants to curl his hand over Chris’, grab his face, make sure it’s okay under all that dirt. Instead, he reaches over his head and pulls the shirt off his own back.

The officer stirs from his desk. “Hey, what are you doi-”

One glare cuts the officer short, transforming him into a scolded child. Let him use the power now, then. Eddie shoves the shirt through the bars, letting Chris’ uncertain hand (his outgrown fingernails, his familiar grasp) take the sweater from him.

“He’s filthy,” Eddie barks back, surprised when the officer winces again. “He bruised up a couple people. He gets to have something comfortable to wear.”

“He attempted grand-theft-auto and then assaulted a police officer,” the man counters from the desk, but it is a weak protest with no action behind it. Jesus fuck, Eddie wishes all authority figures were this spineless. He would have gotten a lot further in life with small-town cops handling his case.

Cold in his thin undershirt, Eddie pulls the jacket back over his arms, the fuzzy insulation pleasurable against his bare skin. He watches as Chris hesitates, then replaces his disgusting shirt with the long-sleeved sweater. His size stretches the fabric, but once he’s in it, he looks cozy. Chris smooths his hands around the front of his stomach, seeming to disorientedly assess his own body.

Then Chris’ eyes are wide again, taking him in. They are so fucking familiar. It pulls at Eddie’s heart. He steps forward and grabs onto the bars himself, close enough that he can speak into the cell without his voice traveling.

The officer cries out another objection, his voice a higher pitch this time. God help them when he gets angry enough to sing.

“Chris,” he whispers speedily, body reacting when the younger steps forward to meet him, bringing his ear close. Eddie’s mouth is dry. “They’re going to figure out who we are. It’s a matter of seconds. They’re going to send us back and I don’t… I don’t... I don’t know what we should do.”

From the inside of the cell, Chris’ hand reaches out. It curls over his.

“Eddie,” he rumbles lovingly. His eyelids hang heavy. He looks like he’s coming out of a long, dreamless sleep. “No one is coming.”

The officer manning the desk finally gets to his feet. “You need to step away from him. Now.” His voice is assertive, deepened with authority. It’s not a bluff. Eddie knows he might use this opportunity to make himself look good to a superior.

Eddie flicks his eyes from the man and back to Chris. “Listen to me. Do you know where you are?” he demands sharply, knuckles tightening on the iron. “Do you even know what’s happening?”

“ _Yes,_ ” he insists firmly, finally looking into Eddie’s eyes. He’s still got a clouded look to his vision, but that gaze rolls over him with sudden and startling lucidity. “Murkoff isn’t coming. I promise, Eddie. They are not.”

Eddie lets go, taking a step back. His eyes search Chris wildly from a distance, trying to appraise if what he just heard was spoken with clarity. Chris is looking at him with absolute thirst- love and concern and pain. His fingers wind around the bars, tightening even though Eddie has stepped away. He must have been tranquilized, drugged with something.

“Does he have bail?” Eddie questions, jerking his head to the officer.

“No. Now come on. It’s time to go.” The brown-haired officer waves impatiently, on the verge of grabbing Eddie himself. Eddie has made too much trouble in too short of a time span.

“Come to the tailor shop,” he tells Chris loudly, the other’s face offering microresponses when he talks. He hopes to death that Chris is understanding what he’s saying. That he is cogent despite his glazed-over appearance. “You met me there a few days ago.” He nods once, trying to let Chris know this is part of the story. “Right on the main street. Come back. I will be there.”

The officer makes another impatient demand. Eddie forces himself to rip his eyes away and leaves Chris behind, fingers straining to hold the bars tighter than they possibly can.


	9. chapter nine.  night vision.

Sometimes he’s too self-aware to fall prey to militaristic flashbacks. Sometimes he’s too comfortable.

The bed below him hovers off the floor, a more appealing surface than anything else he’s rested on since landing in the woods. They searched through the shirt that Eddie gave him, turning it inside-out but finding no notes or weapons buried in the fabric. They don’t realize that the sweater itself _is_ one. It reminds him that out of all of the dreamy, half-blind appearances that Eddie made today, one of them was real. The memory sits clearly in his third eye. Now he wears it with the long, spongy sweatpants they gave him, accruing coherence.

He’s coming out of an empty void, emerging to find his hands bloody and filled with consequences. He was struck over the head with alertness when he saw Eddie. It had awakened him to the bodies, to what he’d done. Then he’d gone down a little bit again. But he refuses to fully submit this time.

Running his hands over his arms, Chris makes sure everything is still there. Still sturdy.

His body is reliable.

Even when his mind goes, his body takes care of him, waiting for him to return to it.

He passes his palms down his legs, over his knees, even gives an appraising squeeze to the bottoms of his feet. In his half-conscious state, it’s more comfort than he can process.

Somebody jabbed a syringe into him when he thrashed instead of letting himself be coaxed easily into the police car.

Even without it, his mind would still be too thick to hold any thought for too long. When he goes to these places, his body systematically cuts each organ off from his consciousness. It takes a long time to reattach everything. Getting his muscles to do what he wants is a feat in itself.

“Hey.”

A voice appears from behind him, spoken in a questioning albeit assertive tone.

Chris turns to face the ceiling, then looks over his shoulder. He rolls slowly onto the side of the bed, reluctant to exit the safe nest he’d made for himself. It’s a new face. The man has a wide, Irish face, his eyes apprehensively evaluating Chris. “Do you know who I am?” he attempts cautiously.

Blinking, Chris tries to make sense of his features. He’s having a hard time lining up his senses.

He shakes his head.

“I’m the officer you attacked earlier,” he introduces himself with a rub to the back of his neck.

Chris snaps forward. His brain churns groggily. He finally puts it together that this incident isn’t synonymous with the one that put him in Mount Massive. He just assumed it was. “Shit,” he exhales, holding onto the bed with his hands. “Shit, I thought I killed someone.”

When he looks back in the cop’s face, he finds a strange look of kinship settled into it. If Chris hadn’t been on that side of the bars before, he would be tempted to call it sympathy. In fact, he still is tempted.

“Your friend said you were here to cool off after serving. You were in Afghanistan?” he queries.

Chris runs a hand over his face. “Army,” he nods, trying to stop his head from spinning. “Bagram. Sent in right after September 11th.”

“I served a little over a year in Iraq,” the officer relates. He backs up and sits on the wooden bench positioned on the wall facing the cell. He’s wearing off-duty clothes, something light and comfortable. He looks pretty beat up; his movements are labored. Chris knows that he’s responsible for it.

“Even that was enough to change who I was,” the man continues, scratching idly at his neck. “I know a lot of guys who don’t sleep anymore without a gun on their dresser. One of my friends shot and killed his wife, dead asleep.”

Chris curls his arms around his middle. He knows plenty people who adapted just fine, but he knows these stories too. Every company of soldiers has at least one. Sometimes it is like a poison, spreading from one man to the next until they are all killing their wives to prevent them from being tortured.

In the months before his mind went dark, he had come home to an empty life. He forced everyone out of it, afraid that Al Qaeda would track him to his home and kill everyone he loved.

That had meant storming into his girlfriend’s apartment and scaring her so badly her friends forced her to never talk to him again. It had meant axing his social media and losing touch with the cousins and aunts and uncles he grew up with, giving them no way to reach him.

“I was there for a long time,” he summarizes, images streaming across his eyes.

He sees their base in Bagram, where he lived in a tent filled with cots. He remembers suspected-Taliban members being seized with rope and transported to the secret prison. He feels the weight of the gun in his hand, which he started off with as a ground soldier, but then steadily worked his way up to an iron bar when he became an interrogator.

“My men and I made a lot of identifications,” he says distantly. “They didn’t want to discharge me because of it. I begged to go after the first year.”

It doesn’t seem like the officer knows what to say. Maybe the silence is one of respect. He finally sighs, putting his hands on his knees and rising to his feet.

“Listen. Here’s what’s going to happen,” he says. “I don’t want to drag you across the state to court. I’m going to send you over to the hospital, get you evaluated. You’ll get a pretty hefty fine, probably beef up the savings of the couple you shook up. They’ll figure out what to do for you.”

Is this kindness?

Chris picks his eyes up off the floor, trying to figure it out.

For the next hour, the man asks Chris questions and he responds. He gives a fake last name, conjures false details about his life, even integrates the small detail Eddie had lended into the whole story.

Then two EMTs come in and put him in handcuffs and attach him to a stretcher.

He wobbles as they strap him in, so similar to how they had him the first full year in the asylum. It rolls a sickness through his stomach, a bile that he has to chew. When he thinks he might shut off again, he thinks of Eddie. He remembers the way the male had fisted his hands around the bar, needing him.

This small-town psych ward that they are taking him to will be nothing. They will cut the bands off his pants and diagnose him with PTSD. They will know something is wrong when they can’t find his name in any record, but he will deal with it when that happens.

He swallows down his fear and knows to pinch himself conscious if there starts to be a problem.

When they rumble the stretcher onto the ambulance, he doesn’t see Eddie grafted to the shadows of the old bank, crouched behind a steering wheel, rage burning from eye to eye.


	10. chapter ten. to be the woman.

One of Eddie’s most accessible memories of Chris is from the day he went missing.

They’d come for Chris the previous night, seizing him from sleep in a flurry of flailed limbs, and almost twenty four hours later, he still hadn’t been spat back out. The night was cresting and Eddie knew he couldn’t sleep alone in there again, with all of those wailing patients sniveling around him. He was disgusted by them.

He’d crunched over them like bugs, escaped through the giant doors, and bolted down the hallway.

By then things had already started falling apart.

Experiments were getting worse. Patients were dying. They were going blind, going mad, ripping the skin off their bodies, becoming scarier to be alone with. Doors were getting left unlocked at night. Guards were fucking patients, making patients fuck each other. None of it was good.

That night, Eddie finally hadn’t been able to take it. The idea of being alone on the hard ground, forced to listen to the never ending masturbation of one of the patients and the endless crying of another was a weight beyond his tipping point.

The severity of those conditions were enough for some of the long-resisting prisoners to crumble into insanity. But for Eddie, it was almost like being immersed in the chaotic pigfuck finally brought him back to his senses.

It was always the systematic, clinical torture that he feared most. It was alone in those rooms with the doctors trying to break his brain, comparing himself to their stark white uniforms of dominance, that he felt like he was crazy. Now he could compare himself to absolute bedlam and realize that _he wasn’t_ that _bad._

So he raced from the room. Fuck the consequences. Any beating wouldn’t be as bad as suffering the loneliness of that common room at night.

He’d run until his body was exhausted, making it only as far as the end of the hallway. He was so hungry. The moon splashed a little bit of light onto his skin through the barred dirty glass, but not enough to sate him. He had just stood there and ached at it.

And then, when the moon had risen too high to be visible from the window, he saw Chris emerge, stumbling down the hallway.

The male walked with a stagger, body hitching back and forth. Eddie wasn’t sure at first what was wrong with him, but then he saw it. There was blood dripping in rivers down his fingers. The skin at the top his fingertips were all torn to ragged chunks, subungual injuries so deep that a few of his nails had lifted and cracked from the inside.

Eddie had watched unmoving as Chris made it down the length of the hallway, the emotions hollowed out of his eyes. Then he fell to Eddie’s feet. He laid down his head and started weeping, pressing his forehead into the older’s ankles.

“Chris,” he had squeaked, terrified, not knowing what to do. “Chris, what were they doing to you?”

Chris had let out a long-suppressed howl, a shriek of pain that pulsed from floor to ceiling before he clamped his teeth over the tail end of it.

“Nothing I didn’t do first,” he managed, hanging his head back to look up at Eddie’s face. He looked like he was begging for forgiveness. He’d bitten lightly at Eddie’s ankles in an attempt to stuff down the pain; the grating of his teeth had turned the skin red. But Eddie didn’t think that was what he was asking to be forgiven for.

Eddie had lowered to the floor then, pulling Chris into his arms.

Unthinkingly, Chris had reached up to bury his hand into Eddie’s hair, the way he’d sought comfort a hundred times before. He screamed out in pain.

°

That might have been the first time Eddie realized that it wasn’t just him.

They weren’t just using his personal history with rape to deconstruct him. They were using Chris’ military background to fuck with him too.

Eddie sits low, watching them wheel Chris from the station and towards an ambulance. Two EMTS maneuver the gurney while an additional man trails behind, talking. Truthfully, he had expected to drive up here and sit for a long time, ruminating. He hadn’t though he’d see anything. Now he’s seeing Chris restrained, his hands cuffed at the front, body tied down by straps.

He lets out an angry, helpless growl, digging his nails in the steering wheel.

He wishes that Chris had attacked them before they bound him, even if it would have made things worse. He’s done with fear. With being shuttled around by other people. He grips the steering wheel and yanks the car into drive.

Lorenna’s hand falls on his shoulder, quelling him before he slams his foot on the gas and drives right into the fucking thing.

He turns, having forgotten she was there.

“Wait,” she stops him. “I think they are taking him for treatment.”

The growl finishes, pulling all of his rage back into his throat. He cannot swallow it back down. Cops, scientists, doctors. They all wear these uniforms that allow them to do whatever the fuck they want. They are all threats to his survival.

He recognizes one of the ambulance workers as an EMT called to the scene when they cuffed Chris but couldn’t get him to stop thrashing. He couldn’t see everything before he ran back to the shop, but he thinks this guy must have sedated him. Even now, Chris’ body hangs limp. Eddie remembers the dazed, heavy way Chris had looked at him. It was like he was dreaming. Like Eddie had appeared to him in a dream.

Doesn't Chris know it was the other way around?

He’d told Lorenna bits and pieces, forging the story with talk of his "hometown" and an army friend who had followed him. Enough to make her hand falter just enough for him to rip the keys out of them when they were arguing in the workroom. She’d chased after him, diving into the passenger’s seat of her own car. He knows he has a long berating to look forward to from her- she’s bold for a woman. He doesn’t know if it’s endearing or embarrassing.

Learning to get readjusted to driving had _sucked_. He’d made a fool out of himself, choppily getting the vehicle from the shop to this point. Now his anger is fuel for instinct. But it’s not just remembering how to drive that reawakens.

A violent, euphoric image slashes through his mind. Its strength is that of the ones he had before Murkoff, when the bodies were piling up in his basement.

He sees himself following the ambulance for a few miles, trailing it into the empty backwoods of this damn state, and then cutting it off. He doesn’t have a strip of nails to lay on the road, so he’ll just go for one of the tires with a knife. Get the driver first, kill him fast, then hold the one in the back hostage. Make him unlock Chris’ handcuffs. Strangle him with one of the straps. Take as long as he wants.

Lorenna seems to notice the change in his eyes. She questions him with a look, showing both nervousness and resistance.

The ambulance lets out a rumble. Eddie whips his head back in time to see it pull away from the station.

“God _damn_ it,” he explodes, scratching at the steering wheel. He wants to rip it to pieces. He jams his elbow into the center, blasting the horn.

“Stop it,” Lorenna shouts, whipping a hand between him and the horn. The man in front of the station looks in the direction of the car, squinting to see inside despite the darkness. “You can’t help your friend this way. If you carry on, you’re going to get arrested yourself. What is wrong with you men?”

Chest heaving, black haired splayed out in front of his face, he sits back against the chair and turns to look at Lorenna’s serious, downturned lip.

He realizes suddenly that he doesn’t hate her.

He realizes there is a lot more to know about her than he can possibly infer on his own.

The first two decades of his life were spent detesting everything womanhood stood for: complicity, softness, simple tasks, submission. He’d spent over the first decade of his life _being_ that woman to his father.

Now it doesn’t seem that simple.

Now all of his rage is pointed (every chamber loaded, each edge sharpened) towards the police. Towards the people who run experiments and jailhouses, who poke at specimens to see what will happen. The shift in his disgust happens so quickly that his heart clenches horribly.

All those people he killed for no reason. His wife, among them.

When he should have been killing these people.

He starts crying, ugly sobs that streak wetness down his face. He feels so helpless.

Lorenna stares at him unblinking, perhaps shocked to see such a display of emotion. She eventually settles on opening her door, circling around to the driver’s seat. “Get up now Eddie,” she coaxes him, lifting her brow when he exposes his tear-stained face to her. “Up. You’re a good tailor but you’re a shitty driver. I’m not seeing how you drive without eyes.”

He lets himself be ushered into the passenger’s side, feeling empty. That building no longer has Chris in it. There is nothing left here. He got so close and now Chris is gone again.

She takes him back to the tailor shop, keeping a steady pair of eyes on him the whole way. She no longer trusts him and because of that, the playfulness has melted off her character. He let himself become erratic in front of her. Now she will be wary of that. But she still parks behind the shop and enters back into it with him.

“He is your lover,” she says matter-of-factly when they are in the safety of the parlor.

Eddie’s chest puffs at hearing it put like that. Hearing someone else state it.

But hasn’t he tried all his life to be with women? Despite all his attempts, he’s only ever felt intrigue at the different ways they conducted themselves. (But he’s been noticing it’s different now. Either this city or this time is different in that way). He’s only ever felt mechanical pleasure when feigning lust with them.

Something about affirming that he likes men is deeply distressing to him. The idea that he could ever enjoy the same things his father did to him... it makes him feel depraved.

He wants to say something that will justify this, make some profound statement about love.

Instead he just mumbles, “It doesn’t make me a woman.”

Lorenna looks at him confused. She just replies, “Thank God, then, because you’re not strong enough.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hellllllo  
> I've been on the island of Nevis, slugging down bourbon until I can't see and writing nonstop.  
> To anyone reading this: I LOVE your comments. All of them. They make me feel so inspired and accomplished, and I appreciate them out of my fucking mind. Don't feel pressured to leave any but if you do, I will respond. ♡ & thank you for reading along with me. It keeps my blood hot.


	11. chapter eleven. recalibrated. it slides back into place.

The psych evaluation goes well: he sleeps for a solid three days.

He’d expected to be taken to a secure wing, far away from the hospital’s central body and into the tips of the building’s fingers. But Leadville’s only hospital is small; he ends up in a bed by the window with another patient hidden behind an off-white curtain. The old man’s ECG divests a melodic, constant tone.

When Chris finally awakens, he is bleary-eyed. His body aches. The adrenaline has been drained from his body, leaving him to suffer the effects of overexertion. He’s been running for the last few weeks, fighting back against nature, subsisting on a meager diet of whatever the forest floor had to offer. Lactic acid built up in his body until he burst into muscle, but he doesn’t think that will last long, curled up like a newborn in these cotton sheets.

He looks down at his wrist. There’s nothing handcuffing him to the bed like he anticipated, just a plastic hospital band that sits more like a feather than chainlink.

Chris drags himself to a sitting position with his elbows. A plastic serving tray is set up on a cart situated between the bed and the window. Shakily, he bumps the fake-metal dome away, tipping it onto its side. He grabs the sandwich, swallowing it in a handful of bites. Slugs down the plastic cup of water. Aches for more.

He’s afraid to get up and ask for it, not because he thinks he'll be denied, but what if he scares them?

Then again, how scared of him can they be if they left him alone with another patient, snoring gently on the other side of the divider?

Chris lays his head against the slightly-propped-up headboard, stomach morphing from ravenous to heavy as stone. His body will parse out each nutrient like he’s still starving. He’ll have to be careful not to eat too much. It’s like before. He was a machine in Afghanistan, but as soon as he got home, he went fat and soft.

A tap comes from across the room.

Chris leans forward, peeking past the curtain to find an older woman standing in the doorway. Her ashy hair is pulled back by a headband and she holds a clipboard under her arm. “Chris?” she tests. He can’t tell if her voice is firm or welcoming.

He responds by sitting up straight, drawing his legs underneath him. He folds his arms across his thighs, pushing the blanket off him so he’s only cradled in the green-patterned hospital gown. It drapes around him like a thin blanket.

“I’m surprised you’re awake,” she admits in a hushed tone as she enters the room. When she reaches Chris, she gives the dividing sheet a little pull, cloaking the second patient even further in obscurity. She looks at his arm, then to the needle dangling from an IV drip at his side, and gets her answer. “You should have called on a doctor if you wanted to come off.”

Groggily, Chris threads his hands behind his neck. “I didn’t-” he protests quietly when he realizes what she’s looking at. “I mean, I must have done that in my sleep.”

The woman picks up a chair from behind her, carries it through the air to avoid scraping it on the floor, and sets it down at the foot of Chris’ bed. “Seems like a lot of your trouble comes from acting out while you’re asleep,” she posits, setting the form on her legs.

Chris blushes sheepishly, turning his eyes away. It feels strange having somebody poke gently at him for a response. She isn’t sticking her hands into his brain and scooping out what she wants, she’s opening her palms and waiting for him to put something inside.

“It’s not really sleep,” he cooperates, placing his hands back into his lap. He dares a peek at her as she scrapes the pen across the paper. There are boxes to check off, then extra room for elaborative notes. “It’s more like a black out. Sometimes like a fuzzy picture. It’s… extreme stress, I guess you call them triggers, things like-”

The woman holds up a hand, signaling him to stop. Then it folds out to become a handshake.

“Before you continue, let me tell you a little about myself.” She takes his hand, her own fleshy and pocked with a spectrum of freckles. “My name is Nancy Lehman and I’m the social worker here at St. Vincent. I’m on call with the hospital to address psychiatric and family-related issues.” She flips back the top page and looks at the one clipped beneath it. “I know a bit about what happened. This incident was an instance of blacking out as well?”

She looks up expectantly, her brown eyes serious but open to new information. Chris has a sudden desire to tell her everything she wants to know.

This formal, pre-written dialogue again hits him as unfamiliar. The civility of it makes him feel like he’s been in a drought for years.

“I felt trapped.” It’s an honest version of what happened. “I felt like I was in danger and needed to get out. It wasn’t exactly like I saw desert instead of mountains. I knew where I was. But I thought if I didn’t escape, I was going to die.”

“You're talking about serving in Afghanistan. Do you remember what specifically brought on these associations?” she continues, leaning over her writing hand.

“I guess it was having no transportation out of the town? It’s a small town. The villages were small too. Taking pictures with children who might be strapped with bombs the next day, seizing a citizen who’s innocent…”

He goes on, letting all of it pour out of him. And it does. By the time he’s finished, she hasn’t even had the chance to pose any follow-up questions, and he’s starving for water. The paper she’s writing on too is starving for more space, for relief from the weighty words that she is packing onto every stretch of white.

“Could you get me more water?” he requests apologetically during a break in his own narrative.

Dr. Lehman slips the pen away. She folds her hands over the paper then looks at his face. “Yes, Chris. But can you tell me your real name first?”

Chris swallows, feeling embarrassed. The surname he plucked out of the air was too flimsy to hold up. He knew that when it slipped from his lips.

He didn’t want to have to do this. But he has been pushed in front of a branching path with no better option.

He uses the name, assuming the false identity even though it dries his entire body back up.

“Mason Everett Burstrom,” he recites.

It's true that she will find no insurance attached to his name. But she _will_ find an address, a phone number, a brief inventory of his life in Texas post-deployment.

In a lot of ways, he has become that person.

Chris Walker was shredded the night be finally put his foot down and resisted, and they shredded his fingers with a scalpel wedged under each nail, reminding him: _this is one of the exact ways you tortured people, and if you think you have had a moral awakening since then, we will make you remember that once you kill your soul, you don't get it back._

And he had remembered.

The next day, he sat dutifully back down in front of the monitors. He placed his fingers on the keyboard, only this time, he had to tap them with his knuckles.

He still keeps his nails long and talon-like to hide the hideous scarring underneath.

When Dr. Lehman returns fifteen minutes later, she has a full bottle of water in her hand.

He takes it gratefully, drinking it so fast he’ll be able to hear his stomach slosh when he lies back down. He wants another one when it’s gone, but instead he looks to the social worker for a different kind of nourishment.

“I called over to the station and they ran a much-sought-after background check,” she grants him before asking him to clarify a few points of information. She checks his answers to what she has written on the back of her form, nodding at each corroborated fact.

“Two priors?” she asks, “Minor tussles at a bar in El Passo? Are you a drinker?”

“Sure,” he mutters.

“Well, the good news is that the chief sat down with the couple you shook up and they agreed not to press charges.” She gives him a little smile, like she’s glad for him. “But I think you really should stay another day. I could give you a proper diagnosis, start working out a treatment plan. I’m sure there are a lot more psychologists in Texas I can reach out to.”

He is racked with guilt and still can’t help but exhale relief. This woman has listened to the pieces of his story he’s allowed to tell and has labeled him as the victim. It’s wrong enough to make his chest twist.

“You’ll be okay, Burstrom,” she says before she leaves. “Keep your mind at the level of your head.”

The nurse comes in after an hour, checking his vitals. She offers him more food, helps him pull the tray across his waist so he can make slow work of it. He tries to enjoy it this time instead of immediately tearing it down to its calories.

After a while the light dims outside, sinking the hospital room into a dark blue. Chris pulls the headboard up all the way and sits against it, listening to the gentle pulse of his neighbor’s heart monitor. Each delicate beep is like a bubble popping underwater. They wheeled his IV away and never replaced it with an antianxiety pill, so it’s not that. He’s aware but he’s calm for the first time in two months. He feels comfortable. He feels cared for.

Chris is drifting through his thoughts, eyes unfocused. At first he doesn’t even realize what he’s looking at. Then he sees Eddie holding onto the door frame, glancing around the room.

His first instinct should have the sense to jolt at the sudden presence. As always, something about Gluskin is spooky as fuck, but it’s not his anxiety that starts racing.

His heart thumps instead, keeping pace with the other man’s monitor.

Around Eddie, Chris has always felt like himself. Not the identity they forced on him. Every time he sees Eddie, something inside him that he forgot was ajar slides back into place.

“Hello,” he gives himself away.

Eddie leans in, looking past the obscuring curtain. When he sees Chris, his eyes relax from their widened stare. He creeps into the room like a spider, holding onto the frame until his fingers are forced to come with him.

“Hello Chris,” he whispers.

Suddenly rainy, Chris runs his eyes over Eddie’s entire body, from the sharp curves of his jaw to his arms, covered by a blue flannel jacket, down his chest and over his legs. Chris thinks they must be underwater. Eddie is approaching impossibly slowly. The gentle beep of the monitor fills the silent room with its sound.

He leans forward in his bed and reaches out. Eddie comes to him.

Chris wraps his left arm around Eddie’s waist. He takes hold of the nape of his neck with the other. Eddie looks at him but his eyes dart back and forth like they can’t take hold on Chris’ face. He looks pained and yet reassured, like a ghost who wandered into a place of healing.

“Essentially, I’ve now seen every patient in this hospital,” Eddie tells him. Then he smiles. It’s too delicate for the severe features of his absolutely gorgeous face and it makes Chris afraid he is dreaming again.

He flexes his fingers on the back of Eddie’s neck to be sure.

“Have you been okay?" Two of his fingers trail into Eddie’s hair. For the first time, he lets himself really consider that Eddie might not have been. He could not have carried himself as well that question on the back of survival without it breaking, but now he is ready to know.

The older closes his eyes, leaning into the touch. “As okay as I can be, darling,” he answers. “My boss told me not to come here tonight, but I just couldn't... anyway. I somehow managed to find a job at the tailor shop. I’ve been collecting money, sleeping on a bed, and trying very hard to forget that you exist.”

Chris grins, a toothy understanding that bites at both of them.

Eddie’s face goes gravely thoughtful. He looks down. “Chris?” he asks carefully, “Why isn’t Murkoff coming for us?”

The question hangs there heavily.

When they were in the asylum, they never talked to each other about what was happening. They saw each other’s wounds when they came back from sessions just as well as they could see the psychological damage where it was inflicted. But they never asked. They never disclosed. Instead, they huddled together, trying desperately to recover.

If they want to stay with each other, Chris knows they will have to talk about it. He doesn’t want to talk about this. He doesn’t want Eddie to run away.

“Please don’t make me tell you now.” It comes out like a beg, and he supposes he is begging.

There are so many memories of Eddie during the asylum dancing around in his head, but this is the first encounter that feels real. He is trembling a little, terrified and in love.

Eddie sits down on the side of the bed.

The weight of another body is as steadying as it always was. Eddie’s hand passes over the top of his leg, seeking flesh behind the pale green drape. Chris’ instincts shriek that once he tells Eddie everything, he will not want to touch him again.

A soft noise comes from Eddie’s throat. He has to strain to discern the words, Eddie is speaking so softly.

“Everything that has ever happened to me,” he considers, dragging the tips of his fingers across Chris’ calf, “I’ve melted down and hidden. Doesn’t exist until it does. And then when I lose my mind, I don’t know the fuck why. I don’t know what I did wrong.”

Chris sits back, his body still.

“But when I see you, I see all of it. Like a beacon that won’t stop burning. It doesn't compare to anything. Not even my thoughts of you.”

From the other side of the room comes a sudden cough. The old man sputters in his sleep, a sound that’s wet and distressing, although his heart monitor goes on unchanged. They both turn to the sound, the reverence of the moment broken.

Chris knows what Eddie sees, because he feels burned down to the husk of himself.

“I would make it stop if I could,” he regrets.

Eddie’s voice cuts back at him. “No,” he contends quickly, tongue lashing. “I need it. I need to be reminded of it all. When I try to stuff it back down, it boils back over. Don’t you understand?” He is gripping Chris’ knee in a twist of fingers that hurt. “When I turn my back on my past, pretend that I lived a normal life, I end up with bodi- I end up worse. Every. Time.”

Hissing, Chris yanks Eddie’s hand off him. The male’s fingers grasp at air as Chris seizes his wrist, letting the spears of pain fade from his skin. He knows how badly Eddie needs to be understood.

“Settle down, Gluskin.” He wrestles against the other for control as Eddie fights to rip his hand back. Instead of letting go, Chris brings it to his face, pressing Eddie’s palm against his eyes. The older stops fighting.

“I lived my whole damn life in servitude to other people.” Chris’ voice is a growl, but it is empty of threat. “So I know who I am. But I would uproot the whole fucking system to get you out. And I did. Eddie, I did, and I promise I will tell you everything you need to know about it. But right now, I need to not reflect all of that. I just need to be me.”

He drags Eddie’s hands down his face, over his lips, letting his eyes plead for him. They glow as bright as beacons, but ones that are clear of grease and oil. Eddie would not be able to ignite them if he wanted to.

So he stands up instead. He curls his hand around Chris’ cheek, cradling him. And then he does what Chris needs him to do.

He leaves.


	12. chapter twelve. window-dressed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cw note: there's a small paragraph or two that's a little bit explicit about childhood sexual abuse (more so than previously) but I still try not to be v graphic about it.

The still dark of his workplace is a comfort to Eddie.

Samuel never reattached the bell, so the door soundlessly seals him inside the deprivation chamber. Unblinking eyes greet him. The busts all around the room live with pins in their heads but they don’t scream. Neither does he.

The last three days were spent in a crazed test of his fine motor skills: he finally got the buttons done.

He wedged a chair against the front desk and started sewing a myriad of silver buttons onto the vests and suits they ordered for the holiday party. It’s barely November but the wives of old money have already planned the night down to their preferred stitches.

His resulting blood pressure had all-but caused an arterial spray to spurt from his eyes. Eddie does _not_ like rooting around the needle from the back of a shirt, into a tiny hole already thick with thread, that pierces his finger whenever his precision slips.

In the end, two dozen outfits got finished and his body was left seething with frustration. But for a while, it had narrowed down his world enough to pretend he didn’t know where Chris was being kept.

He’d told Lorenna where he was going while he was pulling the flannel over his arms. He knew she would convince him it was a bad idea. That’s why he did it, and why he’d chosen a fabric that offered no protection against the harsh wind. But even with all those precautions, he had gone anyway.

He is grateful that he did, even if the entire thing left him drained. Just the thought of ascending to his bed is the size of a mountain.

Instead, he lies down onto the carpet, littered with pieces of thread and lost pins, and lets the moonlight fall on him from above. If he half-closes his eyes, it looks like shadowy people are standing throughout the room, looking down at him. He wants them to see him.

Eddie wishes he were back in the asylum.

He imagines the other patients crawling around him like contorting creatures, moaning in pain. And his body at the center of it all, a shape in the mosaic that was made when it hit the ground and cracked. He is the same color as the others, the same material. But unlike anyone else, Eddie feels like he matters.

He is not part of the mass. He is a single body.

Chris made him special.

Chris let him become his own entity, independent of the horrific bolus that Mount Massive chewed up and spit back out. For his sake, Eddie hopes he returned the favor. But when he really thinks about it, Chris was never another patient. He isn’t in the picture at all. Chris is the one with brawn enough to take the entire mosaic into his hands and smash it on the ground.

He wants to be in the asylum and let the patients look at him. They would envy the ivory of his unbruised skin, the radiance of his eyes after snoring through a whole week of unbroken sleep. He would be the king rat, his limbs tangled up with Chris’.

A hand (his own, he realizes) passes across his chest. He squirms on the ground to shrug out of the flannel, leaving himself a mess of skin on the carpet. The rough fiber scrapes against his shoulders.

It’s impossible to feel the contours of his body beneath his own hand without considering the softness of his boyhood. If he tries long enough, he will steadily fill with adult pleasure, but at first, it’s always about choppily remembering that these _are_ his hands. He’s only afraid that the genetic link means his father and uncle are always touching him from his blood.

Now that Eddie knows parts of his childhood were being sold as pornography, he has a hard time stomaching the idea that those acts were ever perpetrated _not_ for that purpose.

When that scientist told him the pictures and videos were sold as products, he thought he would never overcome the disgust that filled him with. But now he can’t stomach memories of them from when the camera was off. He can’t stand the idea that they ever just _wanted_ to do that to him.

His skin crawls, his hand stops exploring, but Eddie forces himself to remain on the ground.

He knows now that Chris loves him.

If Chris had been a selfish man, he would have let Eddie sink his nails in his flesh no matter how badly it hurt. He would have clung back, pulled Eddie into the bed with him, and made him stay. And if they had done that, they would have both spent the night in the asylum. It would have been too similar.

Now he knows that Chris will only protect him as far as the act of protecting doesn’t cause damage. No matter how lonely that makes him, he feels loved by it. Nobody has ever done that for him before.

The least he can do is try to confront this on his own, when the other isn’t here for him to fall back on if he loses his mind.

The day he felt the least loved; there had been one when Eddie got off the bus after school and crawled up on the couch to watch tv. His father had stepped between the blue glow and his wide eyes, raging about disobedience. He’d grabbed one of Eddie’s ankles and yanked him off the couch. Eddie had landed on his back on the carpet, where his father had flipped him onto his front and forced his head back by pulling his hair. He'd screamed. His mother had hummed on from the dining room.

That was one of the days where his body was merely a weapon that could be pointed against him. The only thing his father had ever wanted was the enraged fulfillment of power, delivered in a mouthful of cum.

Eddie wraps his arms around himself, seeking relief from his own limbs. One day he will be alone again, and he will have to learn how to be safe in his own arms.

At some point in the night, he does want to get off the floor and crawl into his real room.

But he’s too amazed by the fact that the entire time he stays with his head pressed to the floor, he never hears his father tread across it. The mannequins, placated by their new buttons, decide not to disturb him.

If Chris cannot bear to see him again, he will become one too.

He will take the pins and not scream. The fabric will be allowed to muffle all the feelings he kept alive in case Chris should ever need them. Once Chris is gone, he will finally be able to shut off. He will be granted the rest he knows he deserves.

°

Sharp needles of sunlight clip Eddie to consciousness.

He wakes up on the floor of the tailor shop, his body stiff and buzzing with discomfort. As he sits, raw eyes blinking dumbly at the unforgiving sunlight, he considers himself: a grown man, curled up on the floor, tape and thread caught in his black hair.

The asylum never taught him civility. … It didn’t need to, but at least there’s an excuse for this behavior if someone criticizes him.

No one has come in yet, though. He still has time to creak to his feet and take a short nap in his bed before they open up.

Maybe he won’t open up today. Maybe he’ll cut the rope from his hideaway and seal himself permanently inside.

He’s up on sore legs and pulling down the rope that releases the ladder when a pair of keys tap against the glass three times. He turns, the rope still in his fist, to see Lorenna pressed against the lettering on the front glass.

Apathetically, Eddie lets the rope drop and opens the front door for her, squinting against the burning white of the morning.

“Darling,” he greets her, “I would urge you to leave me be today. I’m still thinking of going to those women’s houses and ripping every button off their blouses.”

Lorenna scowls and pushes past him.

“What’s wrong with you?” He feels his voice harden by the end of the sentence, threads of anger growing thicker. She tapped on the door instead of unlocking it just to get his attention. She could have entered and breezed past and left him completely unfazed.

“I told you it was a bad idea,” she hisses back. Her playful constitution is get more and more concealed every time they speak. “I knew you shouldn’t have gone to see him.”

Eddie’s heart stutters. “Why?”

“My father had a heart attack this morning. Now _he’s_ lying in the hospital.”

He’s not sorry to say relief washes over him. “I… I don’t see how that’s related,” he says before thinking to offer his sympathy.

“You’re trying to cheat the universe,” she snaps back, a finger pointed at him. “But it keeps notes, Eddie. If the coincidence is too great, you know it’s using irony to get back at you.”

“You’re crazy,” he snarls, a man who spent most of his adult life in an asylum for killing women.

Lorenna walks in a half-circle around him, examining him with eyes that scrape his skin off. “There’s something off about you.” She points at him with her key as though expecting an attack. “Showed up out of nowhere- James told me your story and it doesn’t match up with what you’ve told me. And now this other man is here, out of the blue.” He eyes her as she walks. “I thought it was a gift, you falling into my lap. But I could see the irony of it.”

“And what’s that?” His voice is cold but biting.

“You pretend to have been abused for sympathy. Pretend to know what that would feel like.” She rubs her arm as if soothing bruises that no longer show up on her flesh. “But why would you use that lie unless you were concealing something of the same size?”

“It wasn’t a lie,” he growls, getting truly angry now. The specifics he used were not genuine, but who is she to question that? “And maybe your father should consider that he deserved what he got.”

“What is _that_ supposed to mean?” she roars.

She stands there boiling, furiously waiting for an answer. It’s the kind of pose that shows internalization instead of action. She’s not a physical threat to him. Eddie shakes his head in response, throwing a hand over his eyes. “It means nothing,” he huffs, feeling exhausted. “I just got really confused. I’m feeling really confused.”

“I want you to leave,” she demands.

Eddie stands there dumbly, thinking of nothing but all the buttons he completed. “You think it’s rational to kick out the only other help you have around here?”

“I’ll manage,” she insists cruelly, curling her fist around the keys. “I was here before you. I’ve worked with less. Clear out your stuff, in fact, take whatever you want. I don’t give a crap. But be out of here by tomorrow morning.”

Then, before he can even defend himself, she storms back out of the door she didn’t even bother to close, the world swirling angrily around her.

Eddie grapples at the air, mind cranking with confusion.

He doesn’t know what the fuck is happening here. Where did this explosion of distrust come from? And if she really thought he was dangerous, why is she stupid enough to leave him alone with all her things, with the combination to the safe etched into his mind?

Fuck him if he doesn’t decide to use it.

He goes downstairs and empties it out, even though there’s not much cash in there. It’ll be enough combined with his earnings to get as far away from this town as he can. He should have done that a long ass time ago.

And then, because it is his nature, he dumps the rest of the silver buttons into the empty safe and slams it shut.

°

Lorenna returns to her apartment, dropping down onto her stuffy yellow couch. She lets out a herculean exhale. She’s going to have to pull up the coffee table now and post these new tailor positions online, as she’s down two employees out of three.

She thinks of Chris. How he was shocked at her appearance by his bedside, his eyes feral enough to attack but wide enough to hide under the blankets.

She knew that she’d seen them both before. Eddie’s features had been anonymized by his speechless nature, which was why he slipped completely under her radar, but Chris has _always_ worn his personality on his body. But she hadn’t let herself believe it until today, when she sought him out after checking on her father.

Sitting on the edge of his bed, it was all the formality of their past except for the nurses’ uniform she used to wear. She’d barely been able to trade her syringe for a sewing needle without having her entire life get tracked. Once you worked at Murkoff, they preferred to keep tabs on you. You were obligated to keep quiet. Or else.

Which is why it’s not safe for Eddie to stay there any longer than he already has.

(They never _said_ or else, but they never had to. She knows what it means when men with slick-backed hair, custom-tailored suits, and an entitled, mocking pout has his strings tangled up with the government. She’s seen who they hire, the countries they come from.

A decade ago, when they were still on the map, she’d headed up there from Leadville for easy money. She’d walked away with her mouth sewn shut. Maybe she wasn’t supposed to see as much as she did. Even so, she’d only seen the collateral. She never saw why she was treating burns and cuts and infections).

Deep down, she knows that if she didn’t force Eddie out, then he would have wanted to stay there, but after talking with Chris for more than an hour, she also knows that he needs to go with him.

She should be strong enough to go with him too, but she’s not. She talks so much about the strength of womanhood and yet she wants to stay comfortable in this family-owned business as opposed to going up against powerful men who can destroy her life.

Is it evil if she thinks they can do it because they have nothing to lose?

Except, maybe, they can still lose each other. But if she beholds Eddie to this place, that will happen regardless. She posts the ad online and has to feel good about her decision. Many years ago, she probably swabbed their wounds and stopped them from getting infected.

She hopes that she played a small part, keeping them alive for this.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> all I wanna do is write but I come home after 10hr shifts and then I just dead dead in the bed.


	13. chapter thirteen. the boxer with mole claws.

He sleeps dreamlessly through the day, curled up in his room where the only lights are the rays that tease through the floorboards. He reaps the energy from the air as he sleeps, sucking it inward to save his strength for the morning. Tomorrow he will be on a train, staggering back into the real world. He might make it off the platform, but he also might jump into the headlights. His bag is packed at the foot of the bed, indifferent to either scenario.

It’s around eleven at night when Eddie is severed from rest.

He wakes with a start, heart beating rapidly, body swimming in heat. There’s a heavy, sick taste in his mouth like a cloth jammed between his teeth. He’s drooled all over his pillow.

His body is impossibly heavy as he lifts himself with his palms, raising his head. A loud thundering is coming from downstairs, the sound of a fist thrashing on wood. His pulse races. He should have left much earlier; he knew he was at risk for her calling the police. They might not have anything concrete, but there are so many fissures in Eddie’s story that he will crack with even a light incessancy. They can start by accusing him of trespassing and go anywhere from there.

The dark room is charged with conserved energy. He needs to stay here, where he is safe, where they don’t know he is. But Lorenna would have told them about his hideaway. He does not want to be boxed into this tiny fucking corner with a sounder of swine.

He stumbles from his bed, crawls to the hatch, and swings down the steps. He descends each rung until he’s back standing in the shadows of the storefront.

Eddie drops onto the floor and squints through the glass, making out a shape lit solely by lampposts.

“Chris?”

Eddie is at the door and pulling it open before the male can bang on the wood again. He fills the door frame, dressed in long pants and the sweater Eddie brought him in jail. He looks grim, his face melded by anger. In the previous days, Chris had looked utterly defeated. Now he looks ready to break heads.

“We have to go.” His gaze pierces straight through Eddie and onto the war path he is following.

Yes. Eddie is _ready_ to go. But he finds himself glancing back into the shop, and it’s not just to grab one last coat hung on the window-display rack. The work he’s done seems to distinguish itself from the random garments in the room. He notices the shirts that he embellished, the dresses he made from scratch. Mannequins and tabletops wear his labor. Even so, he opts for a coat that somebody put together long before he got here.

“Wait,” he presses suddenly, turning from Chris and striding back into the shop. He rushes back up the unhinged ladder and reaches through the opening to grab his satchel by the bed, slinging it around his shoulder.

His weight tips on the makeshift staircase and it lurches, snapping completely into place. Then he is falling stupidly from the ceiling, legs knocking against the rungs.

Chris grabs him from below. He catches Eddie around the middle, breaks his fall, and then sets him gently onto his feet. The older glowers in embarrassment, shaking.

“Eddie,” Chris addresses him, putting both hands on the male’s shoulders. He is finally looking Eddie in the eyes, public blown wide. “Arm yourself. I’m taking you somewhere dangerous.”

Eddie scowls and shakes the palms off of him, rolling his shoulders back. The strap of his bag straightens out. “I am always armed, darling. But it would help if you’d level with me for a fucking second before we plunge into your next secret.”

One look at Chris’ face and he can see that the man is burning with an anger that won’t stop to spare anyone in its way. At the same time, Eddie knows it’s not pointed at him. Chris even seems to have put up some kind of shield to stop the shrapnel from scattering in his direction.

“I will,” Chris promises with a growl. “But they made me so fucking stupid with those drugs. They had me sitting there, poking at jell-o, whining to a psychologist about my problems. It was an immense waste of my time, and now that I’ve shaken out of it, we have to _go._ ”

Most displays of anger get Eddie’s blood boiling. His pulse is going now, but in a different way. Chris’ focused fury makes excitement leap from his heart to his eyes. They shine. “Then let’s fucking go, Walker.”

Before they exit, he grabs the blonde a large winter parka, even though he can feel Chris’ body heat like a furnace just from walking beside him. Out on the street, the air smells crisp, like it’s about to snow, the silence intense. He’s walking on Chris’ right, trailing behind a little to let the man lead, but he isn’t bitter about it. True, Eddie is fiercely independent. He doesn’t like being told what to do. But right now, he sort of feels like an extension of Chris. Like a second weapon in a general’s pocket. Purposeful, his essence and skills desirable at last. He is eager to learn where they’re going.

In the fashion of a small town on a Tuesday night, the streets are completely deserted.

Many of the shops don’t even use small lights to illuminate their signs at night, so it’s just the streetlamps dotting the road. Eddie turns around, peering at the town’s horizon. The mountains are so black he cannot tell where they become sky.

They turn off the main road, onto a sidewalk that sits between parked cars and duplex-style buildings. Chris’ shoulders are squared, sharp enough to point like arrows towards his intention. He knows where he’s going.

The residential area is quite turned-off at this time of night as well. Bulbs on front porches color the brick steps in glossy light. There aren’t many Halloween decorations, but it is the colder season, so there are string lights draped across a few window sills. He really hopes they’re about to get an early snow. He hasn’t felt fresh snow in a long, long time.

They keep walking until Chris takes a sudden right turn, heading down a path behind the rows of houses. The nature is more pronounced here, with grass growing stubbornly through the pavement. Before long, the street opens up into a parking lot. A barbed wire fence rises up from behind a simple wooden building.

Eddie looks up as they approach the structure.

 _Leadville Mining Museum_.

“The mining district?” Eddie murmurs, observing the outline of some leftover metal machine, stretching its neck into the sky. As he learned from Mack’s brief summary of the town, silver-mining was previously a major industry in Leadville. Now it looks like the excavation hub is just as the sign says: a preserved tourist location.

Chris razes forward, picking up speed.

The mining museum/gift shop is housed in a small commercial building similar to all the other structures in this town. Eddie watches from behind has Chris rattles the frail doorknob but fails to bypass the lock. “You can-” Eddie starts, but Chris pulls his shirt sleeve over his fist and punches through a panel of glass. He turns back with a grin before letting himself in with the inner doorknob.

Eddie follows behind, rolling his eyes. The eerie quiescence of the town is traded for the stuffy, cramped interior of the mining museum.

It’s not really a museum. It’s a creaky wooden space with a low ceiling, from which decorative pick-axes are hung. On the walls are framed newspaper clippings, old photos of a mine shaft, and portraits with inscriptions below them.

Wandering across the room, Eddie stops to inspect the cardboard cutout of a mascot. It’s a mole with fuck-all claws, clamped into a hardhat. The creature smiles from its colorful caricature, endlessly ready for a photo. There’s a fake mining cart positioned next to it with little steps built in, so a child can climb inside and pose for a camera.

Eddie is romantically attracted to the pick-axes for sale near the counter, even though he knows they’re plastic.

“Gluskin,” he hears Chris get his attention from the back of the room.

Eddie abandons the souvenirs and wanders further into the shop, where Chris is lingering by the light of the back door. He’s standing at a shelf, pulling a helmet off the top row. The russet thing snaps around his neck, and Chris fiddles with the light to make sure it works. Then he passes one to Eddie.

“Are we… going into the mines?” he questions, a little incredulous. He passes off the jacket wrapped around his arm and trades it for a hardhat. As he fastens it onto his head, Chris pulls his arms through the large coat.

The male nods.

Well, Eddie didn’t exactly line up a series of expectations, but this would have never made it onto the list. If they’re going to hide down there, wait out a threat, then he won’t shirk from the opportunity. It’s that or stagger braindead into a world that moves too fast. It’s just, the mines aren’t… unfamiliar to him.

He’s sudden terrified that he’s being entrapped. He’s being led into a courtroom that already knows he’s guilty and just wants to see him squirm when he’s caught in a lie.

Eddie rips the helmet off and lets it clatter to the floor.

“No,” he objects, taking a few protective steps away from the other. “I’m not going there.”

“Eddie,” Chris breathes back, his voice hardened by impatience. “We _have_ to go. I’ll explain everything. But we have to keep moving.”

When Chris takes a step forward, Eddie kicks the helmet at Chris, scampering away. “You can’t do this to me,” he yelps, gnashing his teeth together defensively. So what if they’re all plastic? He’ll tear the axes off the fucking ceiling strings if he has to. “Tell me what you want right now or I’ll get the police. Don’t think they won’t blame it all on you. I’m not the one they think is violent.”

Chris looks shocked, totally thrown off balance. “What are you talking about?” he bursts.

“What are _you_ talking about?” Eddie screeches back, teeth chattering.

A beat passes in which Chris just looks at him. Then he presses his hands against the top of his helmet, pulling it off. The larger male sits down on the floorboards, shaking his head. “Okay Eddie,” he sighs, defeated. His face is transparent with concern. “Sit down with me. I’ll tell you.” He looks up expectantly, as non-threatening as they come.

Knees quivering, Eddie lowers himself ungracefully to the floor. He folds his legs beneath his weight, ready to spring back up if he needs to.

“Mount Massive isn’t real?” Chris tries, then frowns. “Neither of us are alive?” He seems to realize how stupid both those statements sound. He pinches his nose in frustration.

“Listen,” he settles on, “Murkoff was a big corporation off American soil. They moved here after world war two, got a shit ton of government funding, started executing larger experiments than they could ever afford. But it’s all completely off the map. Nobody is supposed to know about it, which is why they can’t just call down to Leadville and shuttle us back. I don’t know what they’re planning to do. They might think we’re dead. They might still have eyes on us every day. I don’t know. Below the upper management, there’s all kinds of incompetence.”

Eddie looks down, tracing a crack in the wood with his eyes. This is not at all what he expected. Is this even meant to be a shock? Prisons don’t have to be hidden from the public to act like Mount Massive did.

“You know what I did, right?” he asks suddenly, trying to will his body to calm down. “To get in there?”

Chris hesitates. Nods.

“They showed me articles about it. Somebody wrote a _book_ based on it. All they have to do is call in anonymously and say I’m loose and somebody is gonna cage me right back up.”

Placing a hand on the hardhat, Chris shakes his head again. “No. On the record, you’re dead, Eddie . I’m dead. It’s not uncommon to be shot on site by the police. That’s the only way they can make us disappear. But they dug themselves deep on this one. It’s why there had never been an escape until now- it’s too damn slippery to get you back once you’re out, unless you get yourself arrested again.”

“You know a thing about that, you fat fuck,” Eddie shoots back. There’s a dark gleam in his eyes.

To his credit, Chris smiles. “Yes, but, I’m…” he trails off, thoughts brewing. “Can we finish this later?” The urgency creeps back into his tone. “I need to get us below ground.”

That’s when Eddie finally accedes. He stands up and places the helmet around his scalp, smoothing the tails of his black jacket. Before Chris can do it for him, he opens the back door and slips out. It leads them to an open plain made entirely of reddish dirt.

There are broken plywood structures lying all around, relics decomposing where they fell apart. In the darkness, they look like fossilized creatures that could rise again at any moment. Eddie and Chris head for one that’s been maintained, ducking into a tunnel that leads straight down to the mine. This particular entry isn’t used for tours; the pamphlet inside says it’s too unsteady to be safe.

They switch on their helmet beams and follow the slope that leads them down. Moonlight spears through the rungs in the wood above their heads, streaking them in lines of white and slashes of dark.

“Do you know how to operate the elevator?” Eddie asks tentatively. He can do it if he has to, but he considers himself lucky when Chris assures him, “I can work it out.”

When they arrive at it, Eddie steps onto the metal compartment and leans against the rails. He quickly shifts everything to his pants’ pockets: the knife, his wallet. He slips both pairs of homemade knuckles around each fist. They’re made leather straps that tighten at the metacarpals but become metal where it matters. The left knuckles are spiked, the right hand blunt. His palms clamp down on the grip, also made of stiff leather for maximum comfort.

“It’s that kind of night, right?” he checks, holding himself like a boxer.

Chris spares him a glance over his shoulder, fingers examining the operating panel. He smiles out of the corner of his mouth. “Absolutely.”

Eddie shrugs off the overcoat, the satchel dropping with it. He’s not sure what they’re walking into, but he doesn’t think he’ll need a bundle of extra clothing. That can stay here for now.

Right as Eddie has peered over Chris’ shoulder to offer some help, the blonde lets out a triumphant humph. He lights up another button, cranks a lever around a circular dial, and the elevator shudders below them. It begins creaking towards the underground level.

An earthy wall slides past them as they descend. Chris turns his back on the panel, facing Eddie.

“I didn’t know if you would trust me,” he admits, pupils flicking back and forth as the walls move rapidly around them.

Eddie shrugs, the gesture purposefully vacant. “You were in the army. You know what it’s like to trust the person giving you orders.”

“Yeah.” Chris diverts his eyes, prickles of red spreading over his nose. He doesn’t look like he liked that analogy very much.

“Also,” Eddie adds, swallowing. “You’ve always treated me well. Done the most you could for me. Well… you know what it was like. But you were still always there when I needed help. You never betrayed my trust. That’s… rare.”

The elevator hitches a little, sliding into place at the base of the mine. “Yes. I have. The whole time,” Chris disputes

“Wh… what?” Eddie’s question falls flat. The elevator jerks and stops moving. The accordion-like metal doors scrape open.

“I helped them,” Chris says, eyes locked on the ground. His face is blushed by angry regret. “I didn’t want to, but they made me. Within the first year, I was helping them trace prisoners, tracking their transport, organizing their intake.” His words build speed as they tumble out. “And then I helped them record data. Kept track of the findings. Interpreted it.” He swallows heavily, boring a hole in the floor. “Even yours. When I tried to stop-”

He flexes out his fingers, turns them over. Scarring crinkles his fingertips where they disappear beneath his nails.

Murkoff killed off Chris Walker and gave him an alias to conduct business with. They paid him in small comforts, but when he ever tried to fight back, they never tolerated it. There were a lot more instances of retaliation, but the fingernail torture was the worst of it.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Eddie demands, his expression still dazed. Chris knows it won’t be long before it settles and gnarls into antagonism.

“Because,” Chris answers, reaching for a baton on the floor which is just the handle of a pick-axe that lost its metal head, “If I’m going to do what I’m about to do, I need you to be angry.”

Eddie growls at him. “Well, I’m _angry_ ,” he snaps.

Unsettled, Chris rolls the bat in his hand, examining it so he doesn’t have to look up. “Can you keep your head in a fight when you’re angry?” he asks, the words cold. He asks them like a leader would, even though he seems loathe to do it.

“You bet your ass I can,” he retorts between gritted teeth, knuckles flexing.

Chris nods and takes long steps past him, disappearing into the darkness of the cavernous mine. Lights are strung across the tops of the wall but they’re off, putting the burden on the two men’s headlamps to illuminate the space. Eddie bounces to his heels and takes off after him.

“So you knew what they were doing to me,” he calls from behind, dirt flying with each step.

“Yes,” Chris answers honestly.

“And you didn’t do anything about it.”

“I couldn’t, Eddie,” he reasons, his voice raised. He turns around, shoulders heaving. Chris is working himself up. Eddie can see it. And as enraged at Chris as he is, he still feels a flush of excitement spark down his spine. It’s like watching a berserker become what he is before the battle. “I was a patient too. They were doing the same kind of things to me.”

“You should have told me.” He digs his nails into the palm-grip. “The second it started.”

“For what?” Chris shoots back. “So you were at risk, knowing too much? So I could immediately reap from us both the only safe place we had?”

“It really wasn’t that safe, was it, though?” Eddie spits.

He’s furious, but in all honestly, he isn’t as angry as he could be. He isn’t as _surprised_ as he could be. But watching his words hit Chris, how they fuel him, make him get bigger… Eddie swells with pride.

“It _was_ ,” Chris insists, his voice bellowing through the mine. “It was the only place I ever had.”

“ _You_ ever had,” Eddie rips back, sealing the final nail. “None of it was real for me.”

That’s all it takes. Chris yells out in frustration, slamming the wooden stick against the wall. Dirt falls from the wall in clumps, piling up on the floor. “Barry,” he calls out, launching forward. He smashes the bat wildly against any surface in his path, stalking down the hallway. “Where the fuck are you, Barry?”

A violent gust of yellow light from the left-most tunnel abruptly floods the mines. Chris takes off running. Eddie dashes after him.

“What the hell is happening?” calls out a pinched voice. The figure of a man steps into the gateway of light. Chris immediately lunges into him, tackling him to the ground.

Eddie rushes forward.

“Get his gun,” Chris yells, and Eddie obliges, scuttling to the ground. He pulls the gun out of the holster on the man’s belt and sends it skidding down the dirt hallway.

The black-haired male looks frail and scared, but he must be trained, because he heaves up against Chris and escapes his chokehold, wrenching free of the blonde’s hands. Chris’ hardhat falls off, taking the bright headlight out of the man’s eyes. He squints, blinking against spots. “Chris? Is that Chris?”

Eddie punches him in the jaw, sending him flying back onto the ground. He makes a choking noise, shocked enough to give Chris a chance to re-restrain him. The skin below his mouth is red, bruised in the shape of four neat circles.

Chris whips the man around onto his chest, twisting his arms behind his back. He yanks him to his feet, holding most of his weight when Barry groans out morosely.

Things are quiet for a moment. Eddie lifts his head to see into the secret room built into the tunnel. There’s a single swiveling office chair situated in the middle of a mecca of computer screens, all showing footage from different angles. He’s drawn to it. There are security cameras trained on the front of Mount Massive asylum, on the parking lots, down the hallways on the lower floor. His stomach churns to see it again.

Heaving, Chris enters the room and dumps Barry into the chair. He holds the nose of the bat threateningly at the hostage. “Don’t move,” he instructs warningly. “Eddie’s gonna tie you up. I can beat you into the chair if you prefer that instead.”

He thinks he sees the man gulp. As enticing of a display as it is, he shakes it off to look for something he can use. He enters the room and starts examining the contents of the desks. Gaff tape, he guesses, is the best option tonight. The adhesive makes a ripping noise as he pulls it loose.

When they’re finished, Barry is taped stupidly into the chair, his expression akin to that of a man forced to watch an extensively boring play. “I don’t know why you’re doing this, Walker.” His voice is unamused, dripping with venom. “I was real nice to you up there. Bet a lot of them weren’t.”

Chris kicks the chair with his foot, nudging it against the monitoring station. “Thank you for being _nice_ to me, you pussy,” he snides, “I’ll be nice to you too and won’t take your face off. If you tell me everything that’s going on in Murkoff right now.”

Eddie watches from the side, seeing a side of Chris that he’s never observed before: the interrogator, slapping on the skin he needs to get information.

Barry didn’t offer enough of a fight at all. Eddie’s tension is still pulled taut, his anger still climbing. He pulls off both pairs of brass knuckles and they clatter to the floor. When Chris turns to attend to the sound, Eddie’s bare fists are up. “Fuck you, Chris.”

The insult is unexpected. Even Barry shoots his eyes to the side, trying to corroborate his disbelief.

The hard shell of the soldier shows a crack. “Eddie,” he warns, “Don’t make me fight you. You won’t win.”

Eddie walks closer and responds by swinging a fist at Chris’ head.

The blonde avoids it, dropping low to the floor. He lets go of the bat, matching Eddie fairly with a pair of his own fists. When Eddie next comes at him, he lets the knuckles land square in his jaw. It hurts but it gives him a chance to grab Eddie’s wrist and yank him forward, sending him spilling onto the floor.

His knees graze the concrete, but Chris pulls him back up again in a tight embrace, binding him with his own arms. Eddie elbows viciously at the sternum behind him, trying to break free. He can’t. He gets all his energy out on wild cries and fruitless thrashes.

“Murkoff is looking for you. Both of you,” Barry says suddenly from the chair, looking at them like they’re ridiculous. Chris lets Eddie loose but the older doesn’t use the moment to strike. He plants his feet on the ground and looks firmly at Barry too. “They still think you’re hiding out in the woods. There were a couple sites they found that looked lived-in. Your best bet is to get out of the state as quickly as possible. I’ve been covering for you, but I don’t think-”

“I’m staying here,” Chris insists. “And I’m getting the rest of the patients out.”

“What?” come the two voices in unison.

He doesn’t know which face has to turned to gape at him harder. Eddie’s face twists. He snaps once in front of each of Chris’ eyes. “You thick-headed pigfuck. What are you _talking_ about?”

“I have to help them,” he insists, palms open.

“You can’t help them,” Barry half-laughs from his bindings. “Murkoff owns them. You’re more lucid than any of those lunatics, and even you will never be right again.”

Chris snarls. He grabs the bat from the floor and cracks it through the air. Barry’s kneecap shatters. He lets out a scream that echoes awfully down the mineshaft.

“Tell me how to do it,” he demands.

“You _can’t_ ,” the male cries out, tears streaming down his face. His voice comes out in a high-pitched screech. “You’d have to take down the main security, and they’re heavily armed. Where would these people go? You can’t just put them back on the street.”

Chris hefts the bat into the air. Barry releases tight, gasping breaths.

“What is Murkoff doing with the information they’re gathering?” he demands.

“It- it’s militarized,” he answers between heaves of pain, eyes screwed shut. “They’re trying to find quick ways to subdue the enemy. Utilize war criminals’ intelligence instead of wasting them by killing them. They need smarter people. Ruthless people. And they’re just killing them in prison camps. Please,” he begs, bracing for another strike of the bat. “You’re not that kind of person. You can let me go. I won’t be a threat to you.”

Chris laughs aloud. “Yeah? You want to put your life on the end of that bet?”

“Yes,” he cries out. “You didn’t kill those people.”

Chris’ grip falters long enough for the bat to slip out of his hand. “What people?” he demands.

“At Spindletop,” he manages. “Those men that they said you killed. It didn’t happen, that’s why you don’t remember any of it. It was how they got you into the asylum.”

Eddie’s vision goes from Chris’ eyes, burning with an intensity, to his fists, twitching at his sides. “What?” he asks again, the word dropping dead to the floor.

“Your general sold you over. It’s the only reason they let you leave Afghanistan. Murkoff wanted you to work for them full time after assessing your skill. Your superior let them have you.”

Chris looks like he’s about to erupt. He’s shaking with confusion and anger.

Eddie knows he has to diffuse this situation before the entire mine collapses on their heads. He knows what this information must mean to the younger. “Chris,” Eddie attempts, trying to reason with him. “He can’t stay here. We have to kill him. I know he helped you, but he’ll never help you shut down Mount Massive.”

“I know.” Chris looks over to him, sympathy bright in his face. “Don’t watch this.”

He leans over the chair, forces Barry’s shuddering head into the crook of his arm and elbow, and before the man can cry out, twists. He dies with a protest, then a whimper. Then he goes limp against the gaff tape cocoon.

In the quiet of the aftermath, Eddie bends down and picks up his weapons. He heads over to where Chris is staring intently at the body.

“I’m not as angry as I thought I was,” Eddie finally offers. “You were just surviving. Same as all of us. You still kept me safe.”

Chris gives him a sad smile. He puts both hands on Eddie’s face. “I wanted to tell you this: the night we got out, I’d spent the whole day preparing for it. I messed up some of the cameras, fucked with the computers, tried to instill more confusion than there already was. I wanted to get out of there so fucking bad. But I would have stayed if it meant you could. I’m not a good person. I know you’re not either. But I still think…”

Eddie throws a sudden fake-out punch, bashing his knuckles through the air. He stops just shy of hitting Chris in the mouth, but Chris flinches harshly, his mind thrust into the present moment. He holds a defensive pose. Then he laughs, his tension shredding.

“Are you relieved?” Eddie asks kindly. “That you didn’t kill those people?”

An iciness falls over Chris. He shrugs. “No,” he answers honestly. “I feel worse. The crimes I actually committed were worse than ripping off somebody’s head. I am a more horrific person than even Murkoff fabricated me to be.”

Eddie toes at the ground, not sure what to say.

“We should go,” he finally settles on. “Chris. Really. I know you want to help, but we have the information we need. We should run away from this while we still have a chance.”

Chris doesn’t say anything, just nods.

“I’ll think about it,” he promises.

They close the door and walk back down the hallway to where they left the elevator. The mine shaft is so much like what Mount Massive was: a city hidden below their feet, rich with suffering and history, and too dark for eyes to see any of it.

“It already smells like death,” Chris murmurs.

Eddie thinks of the three bodies that he chopped up and brought down here in the last weeks.

They are decomposing in duffle bags to the right of the elevator, so damn close to where a security officer could have noticed him. Mount Massive indeed, then.

Their names are as anonymous to him as he and Chris’ were to the guards in the asylum.


	14. chapter fourteen. focal point.

The non-circulated heat of the mineshaft dissolves into cold air when the elevator clanks back to the surface. Even though it’s nighttime, Chris’ eyelids still flutter against the sharpness of the moonlight when they exit the wooden tunnel. Even Murkoff’s buildings had windows. He realizes that they could have opted for that eye-shriveling darkness if they wanted to. It would have done an effective job at dehumanizing.

But the mines served a much different purpose for the company. They provided little nooks for security to hide in, able to operate safely below ground level. In this same mine, at an entrance point way far up in the mountains, is the location where new patients get shuttled in. The tunnels there have been remade with concrete and steel, large enough for the Humvee’s to pass through.

They step out into the world and Chris blinks. Small, watery clusters of ice catch on his eyelashes.

When he turns to make sure Eddie is still behind him, the smaller male is bent backwards, snow melting on the warmth of his skin and dripping down his face.

“Did you think you’d ever feel snow again?”

Chris refocuses on Eddie and finds the male’s gray eyes on him. The streaking droplets appear to wash off a layer grime where they roll across his skin. Chris has had to stare down Afghani warlords, Murkoff bosses, but his vision has never wanted to waver as much as it tries to now. Eddie carries an intensity that he has never fathomed. He doesn’t know what kind of person he’s looking at. This is a killer with dark black ink smudged around his eyes. This is an alien with reptilian qualities whose irises glow silver. This is a person with more humanity than he’s ever had himself.

“You could almost call it snow,” he evades, putting a palm out. A single crystal of ice lands by his wrist and turns to water.

The next thing Eddie says is not spoken with bitterness or accusation, but it falls on Chris’ ears that way. “I truly hope they rewarded you by letting you outside.”

Chris breathes in the freezing air, closing his eyes. “I didn’t get rewarded,” he remembers quietly. “I just didn’t get punished.”

“So much of life is like that.” When he looks up again, Eddie is watching the mineshaft as though intent on crawling back in and remaining there. “We’re both well-trained beasts. We know how to keep a man pleased with us.”

“Eddie.”

He sucks in his breath when he says his name, and it draws Eddie’s attention enough to make his head snap back.

Chris has been navigating his own tunnels for much, much longer than Murkoff ever set their eyes on him. For most of it, he’s only had his hands to rely on, trying to feel along the walls until he came upon something new. Now that Eddie’s here, there’s something to follow. The male thrums with a bioluminescence vibrant enough to illuminate any cavern. Before he had that, he didn’t know what he wanted. For a long time, he just wanted to get out.

“I know your past,” he discloses nervously, “I have a rough idea of what happened to you. I know who you happened to, too. I put it together without you ever telling me I could.” Thick clumps of icy precipitation hit his jacket and slough right back off. “I know I owe you all of that back.”

“You don’t.” Eddie’s brow turns up, inspecting him. “I know what I need to know about you already. You don’t owe me more than that.”

Chris’ hand twitches at his side. “I need to owe it to you,” he makes himself explicit. “Or I will be too afraid to ever tell you.”

The next sweep of Eddie’s eyes up his front make him _damn_ certain that this man can see into his mind. Gluskin is an oracle, a creature he never wants to see trained. Chris is foolish to think he is not already known.

The snow has created a soft, temporary dusting below their feet. The breeze, hollow and cold, swipes at it and sends it flurrying. Chris steps forward and presses his hands to the sides of Eddie’s face. He kisses him.

The warmth of Chris’ palms are what take out Eddie’s mind first, followed by the hot slip of the blonde’s tongue into his mouth. Eddie has always loved snow for its opportunity for contrast. It comes to fruition as one of Chris’ hands runs into his hair and the other settles between his shoulder blades, pressing until he stumbles into the broadness of his chest.

Eddie staggers and takes two fistfuls of Chris’ jacket into his hands. He slides his tongue along Chris’, whining quietly.

In all truth, he could have eagerly anticipated this, but somehow refused to. It’s different that this is happening outside of the asylum. They are not bound to each other due to a lack of autonomy. Eddie knows he could have anything else, but he wants none of it. He just wants Chris to lie him down in the snow and put his tongue places it has never been before. His backside might go numb- he’ll gladly deal with that when (and only when) he has to.

Starving for touch, Eddie brings both hands up to Chris’ neck and wraps his fingers firmly around its width. Chris’ pulse beats steadily beneath his thumbs, even as Eddie’s fingers start trembling with cold.

Flushed, Chris pulls back. “Do you know where Hayes’ apartment complex is?” he asks suddenly.

All of the affection and hunger drops out of Eddie’s stomach, replaced entirely by surprise. “What?” he scrambles, trying to collect his head. “You mean Lorenna Hayes? My boss?”

Chris’ color deepens, this time with embarrassment. He realizes that he must seem like he’s omnipresent, keeping an ongoing record of Eddie’s life behind his back. “She-” he backtracks, “She sought me out in the hospital. Didn’t she tell you?”

The sound of unresolved conflict burbles from Eddie’s throat. “Lorenna chewed me out, spit me back up, and then tried to eat me again,” Eddie informs him, shoving his hands into his jacket pockets. “She forced me to vacate the shop. You wanna tell me why the fuck that happened?”

Understanding strikes Chris.

After she showed up at his hospital bed, nearly hurtling him into a PTSD episode (or, no, making him believe he was already in one), she’d sat down and talked with him for a long time about what it had been like to be a nurse at Mount Massive. You worked in a single room and saw little else. You didn’t talk to anyone. You fixed anatomical problems and knew that Murkoff had you by the balls if you said anything to anyone. They kept your as blind as possible, but there weren’t enough black-out curtains in the world.

“Do you know who she is?” he asks.

Eddie eyes him questioningly, then scowls. “What is that supposed to mean?”

Chris talks.

They walk back through the store, no souvenirs or pictures claimed, and enter again onto the regular streets of Leadville. The snow stops at some point while Chris is filling him in; Eddie’s expression alternates between horror, relief, repeating cycles of shock, and at last, amusement.

It’s about 2am and they’re standing in a hallway swathed in the color olive. Even Eddie, who spent the previous night asleep on the floor, has the sense to wrinkle his nose at it. He leans against the doorframe and with his knuckles, administers an uproarious set of knocks.

After he’s banged his fist to pieces, the door finally flies open. Lorenna, eyes bleary and mouth snarling, opens the door fuming.

Eddie leans into the doorframe, body pointed at her, smiling lazily. “Hello again, darling.”

Lorenna’s voice goes shrill. “I thought I made myself completely clear the first ti-” She stops.

Chris leans over Eddie’s shoulder. “Hey,” he greets her.

°

The three of them sit on Lorenna’s floor, holding vigil with eyes that barely stay open.

Lorenna pulls away the coffee table, permitting them all a spot on the carpet. The living room is small, with just enough room for a two-person couch and television set across from it. Eddie leans against the foot of the couch, hands cupped around a mug of tea that Lorenna brewed by stepping into the kitchenette area. He fills his stomach with green tea while Chris sips a pot of black, the cup steaming between his crossed legs.

At the far end of the main area is a short hallway. There are three doors and a closet installed in it. She disappeared into one and came back with soft articles for the lot of them.

Chris rubs his jaw where he let Eddie punch him, the injury a throbbing hotness that’ll bruise by morning. He’s now wearing a black shirt, traded from Eddie’s packed bag, with a hand-stitched scarf running circles around his shoulders.

“Lorenna?” he asks after they finish giving her details about their night. “When you left Murkoff, did you ever notice yourself being followed? Ever had a sense that you were being watched?”

The woman folds her arms, pulling her robe around her. “I never noticed anything that conspicuous, but I always assumed it was happening anyways.” She shrugs thoughtfully. “Sometimes a new face would come into the shop, placing an order that didn’t feel right. I never knew, but I keep my mind open. It would be very easy to trace me to my father’s business. But until I figured out who you were, it’d been so long that I stopped expecting them.”

“Do you think we were on camera?” Eddie asks, turning to Chris. “Do you think those mines were being monitored?”

Chris bites his lip. “That is very, very, very possible. I knew who was stationed where from the charts. I never saw a camera on that specific location, but they do plant them everywhere.”

“They’re going to want you back, Chris,” Lorenna cuts in, her eyes dark. “Two deranged patients might be given the chance to die in the woods. But somebody who was cursed with inside knowledge of Murkoff security? They kept me confined to a single room and still threatened my family if I made a peep.”

“Do you think that man was being truthful when he said they were still scouting the woods?” Eddie questions, holding the ceramic mug to his chest. “He said he was trying to help you, but do you believe him?”

Chris thinks about the wooden stick, what he could have done with it. He could have smashed it and used the splinters, gone for escalating bone pain. “Maybe,” he settles on, “I should have spent a lot more time with him.” He laughs dryly. “The one time my skills would have been useful, and I… I lost the taste.”

Sympathy is traded for another unknown. “Even if Murkoff can’t call down to the police station for us, what’s stopping them from throwing a bag over our heads and stuffing us in the back of a van?”

They share a glance, Lorenna and him.

“Murkoff has been kind of a fuck up in the last few years,” Chris responds, uncertain how much Lorenna saw herself. He doesn’t remember how long ago she was let off. “I know they lost a lot of funding. It really had to do with the people they were employing- the men parsing through experiments weren’t ever the ones getting their hands dirty. The scientists who tossed us around were being excessive, sort of having fun. Things were getting out of hand.”

When he looks knowingly at Eddie, (because they were both there for those latter years and directly suffered the chaos), he feels his chest tighten. He doesn’t have to mention any of the specifics. He knows better than that.

“They started cutting corners,” he continues, “Letting old employees go, hiring cheaper ones. I’m not sure that Murkoff’s operations can be justified for much longer, even without the nail in the coffin of patients running away with secure knowledge. They’re on the path to shutting themselves down.”

“That’s good,” Lorenna says.

“No,” he opposes firmly. “It’s not. They will all walk free, and rich as fuck.”

“So what do you propose we do?” Eddie demands, still extremely sore from Chris’ assertion that he wants to let the patients go. “Break in, guns blazing, and get blasted to pieces? Get on our knees in front of a small-town constable who is mediocre at issuing parking tickets?”

The outpouring of complications make Chris pinch his nose. “I-” he mulls, distraught, “I wanted to call the captain I served under in Afghanistan. But if he really did sell me to Murkoff like a whore…” His voice is an agonized growl by the end of it. If he gets to the point where his mind is mercifully shut down and taken over by his command center, there will be a lot of bodies stacked up on his bayonet.

Lorenna releases a yawn. “Well none of it is getting worked out tonight. If you think you’re safe right now, let’s get you guys to sleep.”

Eddie lifts himself onto the couch while Chris and Lorenna spread a thick comforter onto the floor. Their hands are both deft: Lorenna’s dark and slender, honed by fine motor training. Chris’ large and calloused, good for bearing masses that no herculean figure should be burdened with.

He imagines what Chris’ military training would have looked like if he was in charge of the curriculum: 

whipping a giant lead ball across the desert, the handle gripped by both hands… 

shaking the dust from his hair, sand crumbling down his shoulders… 

a black face mask studded with golden spikes hooked around his mouth and nose as he hangs onto the back of a van, a fiery baton held in the air, his bright blue eyes jutting through, as he throws an explosive into a crowd of everyone who ever crossed him…

Eddie looks up in time to catch the end of Lorenna’s weary goodnight, his boss already turning down the hallway to shut herself into her bedroom. He blinks the fantasies away, replacing them with the true vision of Chris sitting on the floor below him.

One of Eddie’s legs is tucked under the other, leaving one foot dangling off the edge. Chris takes it into his hands, kneading the skin with his thumbs. He leans back against the swimming pool of blankets and pillows that Lorenna left them. “Can I ask you something?” he attempts.

Eddie turns his eyes down in approval.

With the flat of his palm, Chris cracks almost all five toes simultaneously. Eddie smiles.

“When they were doing your trials, I only saw the raw data. They used scales, mostly, and sometimes there were scribbles to transcribe at the bottom too. I know they were forcing you to confront childhood sexual abuse.” He traces the back of a knuckle up Eddie’s sole, eyes intent on it. “They were… I guess, trying to pinpoint the exact level of trauma re-exposure that could break you perfectly.”

“Is this a question?” Eddie mumbles disinterestedly.

“One of the measures made it seem like… Well,” Chris recalls, “Did they ever engage you sexually?”

Eddie sighs. “It sure seemed like it was going there, love. But yeah, a little bit. Not for the reasons you’d think. Not to cause flashbacks.” He hesitates. “You?”

“A little bit,” Chris echoes.

It shocks him to realize he wants to keep talking about this. But not while the lights are on. Not while Chris is pressing his foot to his face and it’s equal parts arousing and filthy, a sustainable feedback loop.

He pulls his feet back, plants them both on the floor, and gets up to pull the chain hanging from the ceiling fan. They are both submerged in darkness, save for a tiny nightlight plugged into the outlet that hangs over the kitchen counter.

Eddie lowers himself onto the comforter, guiding himself around Chris’ body, a focal point. He designates a space for their heads, arranging one of the longer blankets around both of them. Chris’ breath in the darkness is something he can cling to. He puts out a hand and holds onto the younger’s shoulder.

“It wasn’t that bad,” he hears himself say, a half-lie. “It wasn’t nothing, but you can sort of turn it off at a certain age. You realize it’s not a kind of sex, it’s just a violent act. Never underestimate how much that helps to stomach it.”

Spots dance through the darkness as his vision tries to adapt. He can only really see Chris when he moves. The blonde wraps his arms around him, urging them both onto the floor. They lie down together on the makeshift bed, uniting beneath the covers.

“It was the right decision for us, refraining,” Chris rumbles low. “I didn’t really know what you were going through. You didn’t know what I was going through. It could have been really destructive if we had let each other take it too far.”

“What, if we’d ended up rutting like animals on a piss-stained floor while dissociative Dennis talked to himself in the background?” he grits bitterly.

Chris laughs and knocks his hand beneath Eddie’s chin.

Eddie is continuously surprised at what Chris will laugh at.

He is relieved. He leans forward and presses their mouths together. He already feels his chest grow heavy, wanting to cry at the sensation of skin on his own skin. Chris’ bare arms wrap around his, unshaking. There is no patrol to fear, no sense of shame. He knows what Chris must have felt like in Afghanistan, because Eddie’s own skin has swallowed down sand and refused to breathe in years and years. Maybe his whole life.

“But now? Are you saying it’s okay now?” Chris asks against his mouth. His hands slip down to take hold of Eddie’s sides, pressing the fronts of their bodies together.

Eddie’s cock is stiff already, draining all the blood from his head. He feels dizzy with a senseless thirst that he never allows to take over. He grabs one of Chris’ hands and smooths it down the front of his chest, hitching his hips against the blonde’s front.

“Please. Slowly, okay, Chris?” he offers weakly. “I’m so fucking starving I don’t know if I’ll be able to keep my head about it.”

“Oh,” Chris responds, mouth dry as Eddie thrusts against his palm through his clothing. He’s clearly affected by Eddie’s desperation. “Increments. Caution. I’ve got this.”

Eddie feels Chris’ hand slip down his pants, hand curling around his cock. He huffs helplessly, nipping at Chris’ mouth for more. The blonde starts fisting Eddie’s erection, sliding his fingertips along the vein on the underside. Eddie keens and jerks his hips up, fucking himself into Chris’ hand. Pleasure racks through his body.

“It doesn’t feel the first time we’ve done this,” Chris speaks quietly to him, using his other hand to press a steadying hand to Eddie’s chest. “I know you so well. It doesn’t feel any different from anything else. Are you alright?”

Eddie’s arousal plateaus, ready to nudge him over the edge. He’s afraid he’s going to get thrown out of his mind. He’s afraid Chris is going to pull away at the last second and leave him gasping for a climax he’ll never get.

He realizes then that his body is tingling, not trembling. He’s panting in fear, not desire.

“No,” he pleads hurriedly. “No. Please stop.”

Chris’ hands disappear immediately and reemerge on his shoulders, holding him firm. Eddie’s body thrums, dislocated from its own consciousness. Chris is the only tether keeping him from dissolving into the air.

“It’s all good,” the larger male assures comfortingly, “This is still the first increment. We’re under control.”

He can’t stay sucked down in this darkness, swimming and confused.

Eddie pulls himself to his feet, ghosting out of Chris’ arms. “I’ll be right back,” he whispers anxiously, fleeing the room.

He finds the bathroom in the hallway and slips into it, illuminating the space with the bright lightbulb over the mirror. Taking forceful breaths in, he closes the door and sits down on the toilet seat, clutching his knees for support. The tub bumps his left leg, the cabinet-sink his right, but he doesn’t feel claustrophobic. He feels protected.

He reaches into his pants and pulls out his cock, hand flying over it until he’s fully hard again. His own actions are less gratifying, but they’re predictable, reliable.

They would sometimes make him watch those tapes and stimulate him right up to the point where he was going to come, and then stop everything. Or they would pull away and watch him release pointlessly into the air.

He didn’t realize that affected him this much. But of course it has. How could it not?

Eddie leans his head back, gives in to it, and spurts all over his hand. He pants. He’s fine. He’ll be fine. He doesn’t know how he could ever put those experiences into words, but they’ll figure it out. They’re still in the first increment.

He fixes himself and toes sheepishly back into the living room.

Chris is sitting on his back with an arm propped behind his head, waiting. He angles up when he sees Eddie approach, concern all over his face. Eddie feels a pang of guilt but he doesn’t know why. He feels like he has cheated Chris out of something they both deserved.

“I’m sorry,” he produces before Chris can say anything. “I’m okay. Next time?” He smiles apologetically, teeth sharp.

“Sure, Gluskin.”

He’s not sure how he will do this. How does he tell Chris all of the things that happened to him without getting treated like a fucking infant? How does he avoid saying it out loud and expect that he won’t end up levitating out of his body?

He goes down to his knees, picks up one of Chris’ hands. He presses it to his mouth.

“We’ll kill em,” he promises. “Whether we storm the asylum or trace them to their homes when they’re old men. A day of reckoning will come.”

So there they are: the two focal points. Come and kill. A simple purpose for a life that’s been dragged on its face for too many years.

Chris pulls Eddie into his chest, wrapping them both inside the blanket, like he’s nesting him.

“Eddie,” he whispers, running a hand adoringly over the side of his face. “I love you.”

Three.

Three focal points.


	15. chapter fifteen.  his leviathan.

In the morning, Eddie lifts his body from the chrysalis of blankets, raising his head into the brisk, chilly air of Lorenna’s apartment.

Chris stirs at the movement. Planted between Eddie’s two palms, he rolls his eyes tiredly to the ceiling, blinking. Mussed into the twisted blankets below and above his body, he lets out a forceful yawn and buries back into them. He begins snoring again immediately.

The square-shaped scarf sits bundled up on the couch. Eddie pushes to his feet and grabs it, wrapping it around his shoulders like a blanket. It still takes a lot of will power to give up the human furnace he just had access to.

He trails through the freezing living room and into stout hallway, eyes feasting distastefully on the olive-yellow wallpaper fleurs. For a designer, Lorenna is certainly living in homeliness.

(It gives him a touch of satisfaction though. For once, he doesn’t feel like the ugliest thing in the building).

Her door is half-open, an invitation. He isn’t sure if it’s as early as he thinks it is, or if the hazy sky is responsible for the sensation. Eddie raps on the wood.

Following the sound of footsteps, Lorenna pulls the door open the rest of the way, giving Eddie visual access to her bedroom. There’s barely enough room for the queen-sized bed that sits in a flurry of personal possessions, which are stacked around the room in various containers. The main centerpiece of the room is a standing mirror, which Eddie is hesitant to look into, because it seems like the kind of artifact that will reflect back all his dead relatives.

“You have a lot of trouble ahead of you,” Lorenna speaks unprompted. Her lip is turned down, signifying a great mull.

Eddie smiles and sinks against the wall, steadying himself. “Yeah,” he murmurs, the coldness of the air more invigorating just from knowing he’s made it further than he was ever meant to. “That’s the thing about borrowed time. You have to give it back.”

“Will you?” she asks, her dark eyes piercing to him.

He shrugs with a self-deprecating exaggeration. “Chris and I will never be able to go back and live normal lives. We can’t open bank accounts, can’t get legitimate jobs. We’ll never be able to buy property or cars or even dental care. The best I could hope for is being fingerprinted and sent to a real fucking prison.”

Lorenna studies him. After a long pause she finally says, “Maybe that would be good for you.”

A small bead of anger prods at Eddie. He lets it settle before he responds, sighing instead of seething. “It might. Or it might be the last time I ever snap. I don’t know.” He glances into the living space, at the bundle where Chris is sleeping. “Do you think he could do it if he wanted to? Close Murkoff?”

Maybe it’s because of Lorenna’s unwavering belief in luck, or her benefit of the doubt, which granted Eddie a few unjustified months outside of the asylum, that makes her seem more connected to the answers. Whatever it is, Eddie feels himself looking to her for them.

“From what I know about Chris,” she considers, “He struggles to perceive valiance in a world motivated by greed. He hasn’t realized yet that these corporations are larger than the individuals running them. They’re his leviathan.”

From a distance, Eddie trails his eyes longingly over the obscured shape of him. He’s not used to being able to long. He’s always been is a state of _going_ , no time to chew through the intangible.

“You should realize that about _him,_ ” she adds.

Turning back to her, Eddie feels something coil around him. Dread, or maybe, souring hope. “I don’t think Chris believes in levels of power as much as we think he does. I don’t know if he sees the world like that.”

Something bitter crosses Lorenna’s face. “To be able not to see it means you’ve been privileged with higher levels of it.”

Rationally, Eddie knows he should let others have their own share of suffering, but the greedy creature inside of him doesn’t want anybody else encroaching on the only thing he has. This blind rage that he feels refuses to be broken. It’s an untrained beast of his own, and its only cage is the crater of his chest. He knows he is not alone in this. There is something incontrollable inside Chris too. Once you develop the kind of rage that allows you to survive, it outlasts everything else.

When he dies, it will crawl out of his ribs and survive on somewhere without him.

Chris may be a leviathan, but Eddie is a small survivor who will rip out the throat of anybody who threatens the few precious things he loves.

“Walker has been in these positions,” Eddie growls back, “All kinds of them. And he’s never acted like it. Never.” He folds his fist against the wall and knocks on wood, trying to add a supercilious flare to his anger and deescalate the conversation.

The front door knocks back; four pounding blows hit the flimsy apartment entrance.

They both freeze.

“Police! Open up!” a voice shouts from outside.

In the living room, they see Chris scramble awake and launch to his feet, hands raised protectively in front of him. He shoots his eyes towards Eddie and Lorenna, trying to communicate nonverbally. Eddie takes a step forward, eyes wild. No one speaks.

More knocks. “You have thirty seconds to open up before we force entry!”

Chris waves his hand forward, prompting Eddie to come to him. The older speed-walks across the floor, meeting him by the couch, where they lower defensively against the wall. The solider motions with his eyes for Lorenna to get the door.

She may not be partial to the idea of stratified dominance, but Lorenna certainly responds to Chris’ instruction without hesitation. Or perhaps this is just the kind of person she’s always been. She and Eddie have a lot more in common than he grants.

She pulls open the door without even eyeing the peephole, and for that, Eddie feels a burst of respect. Also fear. His knees shake as he crouches ineffectively behind the arm of the couch.

The door whips open with the entry of two officers. They press in upon her as she steps back into the apartment, her chin raised. Eddie feels Chris put a reassuring hand on his shoulder, momentarily scraping against him with his outgrown claws, but the officers don’t spare a glance to the rest of the room. One of them has his gun pointed at Lorenna’s shoulder.

“Lorenna Hayes,” accuses the officer towering over her, “You are under arrest for the murders of Marcelles Lorenza, Thomas Anthony Germaine, and Herman Smith.”

“Wait, _what_?” she bleats, astonished. Everything seems to drain from her. “You mean those guys who were missing?”

The male takes advantage of her surprise by handcuffing her behind her back. That’s when the second officer spotting him relaxes, eyes doing a scan of the entirety of the room. Eddie darts forward.

Chris fails to tighten his fingers at the last moment. Eddie ghosts straight through them, the scarf falling to the ground.

He tackles into the flanking officer, going straight for the dominant arm. He clutches it with a grunt of effort, biting through his sleeve and into the soft flesh of his inner elbow. A deafening shot goes off by his ear, the last squeeze of an impulsive finger before Eddie twists his teeth and the officer screams, dropping the gun.

Meanwhile, the leading officer hollers angrily for them to get back, pushing Lorenna away from his body so he can get to his gun. The cuffs dangle loosely from one of her wrists.

Chris takes care of him while Eddie is gnashing at the second one. He actually knows what he’s doing; he seizes both of the man’s hands to restrain him, pins him to the couch with his hips, and puts a chokehold on him. The man goes to the floor. Chris gives him a steady descent, then pulls the gun from his side and takes it for his own.

Eddie doesn’t know what to do, so he just deepens his teeth like an animal that refuses to unlatch. He feeds his molars into the man’s skin, pulling until he feels skin rip off into his teeth. He can’t let up to see how bad it is, but the male is screeching his ears out and there’s wetness dripping down his chin. He doesn’t know when it’s safe to stop.

At last, he feels Chris pull him away, the man’s hands a cooling balm where they secure around his shoulders.

The man crumbles to the floor. Chris lets go of Eddie to grab him before he hits, taking his neck into both hands as well. There is a reasonably-sized, mangled wound in the center of his arm that’s gushing blood. Chris tries to wrap it by tearing a piece of fabric from the rest of his shirt, but it’s a destitute gesture.

Lorenna whips her hand frantically like the handcuff is a bug she’s trying to get off of her.

Chris straightens and steps away from the unconscious body, his shoulders squared and impenetrable. He gives an appraising look to Lorenna first, then to Eddie, who has blood streaming down his bottom lip. The commander he is makes himself known. Leviathan.

Initially, Chris doesn’t offer any hint of an opinion, positive or negative. He just raises his thumb and swipes some of it off, bringing Eddie’s normal flush back.

He edges forward, whispering. “Gluskin. I won’t ever kiss you wrong way. Fuck.”

Eddie scoffs and rolls back, shaking him away. Guilt quickly shatters through his body. He looks at Lorenna sadly, thinking of how stupid he was to use the bags from the shop to disassemble the bodies. Her hair was probably caught in the zipper. Maybe her name was embroidered on the side, fuck if he knows anything when he’s being feasted on by his emotions like that.

“Lorenna, I-” he starts. “When we broke into the mines, they must have inspected the damages and followed them to the bodies.”

“The bodies,” she echoes back.

“I didn’t mean… It just…”

“This is good,” Chris announces in a rush, leaning down to pick up the second gun. “I have a plan now.”

“This is _good_?” she roars back, stepping over the men on her carpet. “Maybe if you’re not the one they’re sending to jail. Maybe if you don’t have anything to lose. My only life is in this town.” She throws her hands in the air. “I made a miserable mistake of letting Murkoff back into my life. Even if it was just the two of you.”

Shame makes Eddie want to hide away, but Chris seems built on rolling energy. “Murkoff and the police have collided,” he rambles. “This prospect is insane. If they found the security room in the tunnels, then…” He passes off one of the guns to Eddie, which the male takes hesitantly. “We have to get out of here right now. But listen. Lorenna.”

He steps up to her. “Report us. Tell the police that we were holding you hostage and that we escaped from Mount Massive. I could shave my entire fucking head and the DNA would point to somebody else, but all Eddie has to do is leave some fingerprints to start a shitstorm.”

Lorenna rubs her wrist, muttering curses to herself.

“Tell them we attacked the officers, that Eddie was responsible for those other deaths. Try to launch an internal investigation. Let the shit fly. Murkoff will shrivel into nothing with a little light poured into it.” He takes a steadying breath in, trying to calm himself before giving an instruction. “Then tell them we stole money from you and you think we’re headed for the train, leaving the city. Give them a fake destination. Anything. Anywhere.”

Eddie runs to the bathroom as Chris finishes his thought. As he rubs the blood off his face, he looks frightening, even to himself. He looks in his element. Maybe the ancestors are revealing themselves to him, after all. His father may or may not have looked like this all of the time.

When he comes back out, Chris has grabbed his bag and is bundling the gun up in a pair of pants. Eddie hands over his own firearm, looking at Lorenna.

“Thank you,” he says dryly, knowing his words land acrid among the smell of blood. His voice stumbles. “…Will you do it?”

Will she try to break the leviathan into its parts, so it can be destroyed?

As an answer, she slings knives at him with her eyes. It is the sort of look he would have killed to see his mother give him. It would have changed his life for the better if she had, instead of always offering those dewy, buttery vacancies. Finally, Lorenna gives a sharp, angry nod.

Chris zips the bag closed and looks at Eddie. “Open the window, Gluskin,” he instructs. “Get your fingers all over the glass before we jump out.”

Eddie thinks of the first window they jumped out of. It gave them a brief chance at tasting air again. And now he is here. “What do you have in mind, darling?” he asks feebly, already aware of the answer.

The talons on Chris’ fingertips outshine the damage obscured below them.

“We’re gonna go back up the mountain,” he confirms.


	16. chapter sixteen.  like a mountain.

Eddie skids down the side of the house, landing from the distance of the second floor. It feels like there might be shingles poking out of his arms and paint chips in his hair, but he lands okay. His knees absorb the shock and it sucks, but he’s mostly unharmed as he peers around the side of the building and eyes the police cars flashing eerily at the front door.

In a blur of peach, Chris lands at his side, gritting his teeth as he plants his feet into the grass. His attention makes the same orbit as Eddie’s, noticing the vehicles on the side of the street. There may be other officers waiting to respond in there, getting nervous when nothing comes through.

A sudden whistle-sharp hiss pulls Eddie’s attention upward.

He cranes his neck up the building to see Lorenna leaning out the window, dangling a keyring between her fingers. She hefts it once in warning and then lets it drop. Eddie catches it above his head.

 _Where?_ he mouths, opening his palm.

Lorenna jabs her finger to the north-west, in the direction of the shop, then disappears from sight. Eddie decides to assume she’s getting on the phone to alert the rest of Leadville’s officers that there are two madmen on the loose.

“Do we need a car?” Eddie whispers hurriedly, pressing the keys forcefully against Chris’ breast to transfer the leadership.

Chris fumbles, taking them. “It’d help,” he says back urgently.

“Okay, then we need to get to the tailor’s,” Eddie informs, stalking forward through the grass of the connected lawns. He hangs towards the right, as far from the road as he can get without trudging through a private backyard. He hopes all the blood is off him, but he’s sure it’s not. He frowns. “Which is on the way to the train station.”

The blonde picks up speed, passing Eddie with long strides. “But sure as fuck better than pulling out and hitting the nose of those cop cars,” he counters as he passes.

Lorenna’s apartment is no distance from the tailor shop at all. Eddie can already see it down the road, just past James’ diner. He hadn’t expected hamburgers when he first came paddling into this town. He’d expected… well, something more like this.

Chris sticks his neck out but then immediately pulls back, ducking into the shadow of the small shop beside the diner. There are at least two more police looking over the tailor shop; one pulls on the door knob so hard Eddie thinks it’ll rattle off in his hand (there’s been experience with that), while the other looks around the yard.

“I know one of those guys,” Chris tells him, ducking down by Eddie’s ear.

“Yeah, I know both of them,” he relates. “Look over there. Lorenna’s car is in the community lot just to the left of the building.”

They sit tight, watching from a safe distance until the officers get stirred up into a frenzy and start walking hurriedly in the opposite direction. Pursuing a crime that just got called in, he guesses.

Chris straightens and starts heading towards the street.

He’s stopped by Eddie’s hand; five fingers wrap around his forearm and pull him back. A jolt of fear goes through him, but when he scans for danger, there’s only Eddie looking at him, his gray eyes licked with fire.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” he murmurs, thrown.

Eddie steps forward, filling the space between them. His prying hand flattens out, smoothing up Chris’ bicep. “I want you,” he says lowly, a mess of desire and adoration in his voice. “I don’t care where we go. I want to have you when we get there.”

Chris collects Eddie’s face into his hands. “Eddie,” he soughs affectionately, “There is no time for this.”

These chest-crushing, heart-clutching sensations aren’t creatures that Eddie is well-acquainted with. But damn if he won’t feed something other than the hatred. He needs the anger to starve to death. He needs to give the resources to these new mouths whenever they open their jaws.

“I know,” he answers. He breaks out of Chris’ hands and leads them across the road.

It’s early morning and the sky is still shaded from the clouds that snowed the previous night. Still, they go low and speedily, grateful that the storefronts are all still dark. The temptation to slow down halfway and appease his fears with a glance behind is strong, but Eddie refuses it. He’s almost shocked when he makes it to the side of the building, flattening himself behind the wall.

Fuck, it feels awful to run and not know if you’re about to be shot. He’d rather look it in the eye and take it between his teeth.

“Unlock it,” Eddie commands Chris when he catches up with to him, gesturing to the rusty blue car. It’s parked just beyond the strip of grass that divides this property from the city lot.

Chris angles the keyring out, seeking the car. As soon as Eddie hears the beep and Chris sees the flash, they dash at it, Chris traveling around to the driver’s seat as Eddie opens the passenger’s side. Sliding into it feels wrong, knowing that he’s taking it away from Lorenna. But as Chris slams the door closed and cranks it on, the guilt dissolves into urgency. They back up and drive out of the parking lot.

As they roll away from the skyline, heading back towards the gas station, they both turn their heads hesitantly towards the apartment complex. The same two police cars sit frozen in front of the house, their lights flashing. Eddie cranes his neck just in time to watch another blue-uniformed body rushing through the doorframe. There’s a siren call getting louder and louder in the distance.

With a foot in the gas, they leave all the pandemonium behind.

Eddie lets out a gust of wind and sinks down into the seat.

Chris laughs suddenly, swerving to the left and putting them on the road that leads back into the woods. “Well, that answers that,” he comments.

With a hand pressed steadyingly to his forehead, Eddie shifts in his seat so he can watch Leadville disappear behind the trees. The forest eats them whole, but where his body was once wracked by that horrible peristalsis, he now takes comfort in this slickness that swallows him down.

That answers that.

“I wouldn’t have lasted long regardless,” Eddie confesses as they follow the road up the incline, tree trunks thickening on either side. “My brain is broken. I can’t fucking stop it.” His mind whirrs frustratedly. “I thought maybe the idea of finally getting free after being in that god damn fucking cage for my entire life would be enough leverage, but it wasn’t.” He stares angrily at the window, pupils darting rapidly at the moving ground.

When it gets too exhausting, he looks over at Chris. The morning gold is spilling into the car, coloring Walker’s skin. His hands are holding the steering wheel at a weird, outstretched angle, hands clocked at 11 and 5, and he’s breathing very quietly in concentration.

He doesn’t dare to take his focus off the road, but the hand on 5 reaches out and grasps the back of Eddie’s scalp. His curling fingers take a fistful of Eddie’s hair. “Feels okay,” he responds. His hand drops down to the back of Eddie’s neck, giving it a considering squeeze. “You feel good.”

“You don’t feel the jaggedness?” he winces, experiencing loss when Chris returns to the steering wheel.

Chris straightens in his chair. “I do.” His eyes dart from the rear-view mirror to the road to the forest and for once, catch Eddie in their calculations. “It gives me traction. Something to hold on.”

Not knowing what to say, he keeps quiet for some time.

Eddie studies the forest and tries to feel grateful that he made it out. Chris gets to a comfortable place with driving, building confidence in his muscle memory as he realizes it knows what it’s doing. Eddie understands. These things are mildly shocking to reexperience. They were far away for so long than it seems impossible they crept into the immediate present.

“I believe in God,” Chris says suddenly, jarring Eddie out of his thoughts.

“But I don’t think he will forgive me,” he continues. “I think that we both ripped up our souls a long time ago. So if you killed those people? I understand that. How could it get worse?” He breathes out sharply through his nose. “Mount Massive didn’t absolve us- I don’t think our souls were cleansed just because we were tortured. God doesn’t understand.”

A bird squawks from somewhere in the forest. Tied with string from the rearview mirror, a lavender-colored stone swings back and forth through the air.

“I don’t believe that God exists,” Eddie disagrees. “And wouldn’t want him to understand me if he did. Or you,” he adds, almost possessively.

“Why do you say that?”

“I’m not like you.” He looks down. “Chris, you tortured people… right?”

Chris hardens his face but nods.

“Yeah,” Eddie says, “I can see it in how you operate. And I can see it because it tortures you back. If there is a God, he’s been making you pay every second since and I would shed all the souls I’ve ever had to kill him for it.”

Chris’ blue eyes flash onto him, cutting with pigmentation brightened by the onslaught of sun. There’s both vulnerability and amusement in his regard. “Shed all the souls you’ve had,” he echoes. “Kill God.”

Eddie leans over to Chris, putting both his hands on the blonde’s thigh. “I’ll shed your soul, too,” he purrs, brushing his lips to the other’s neck. “Lay it down in my arms and forgive it.”

This entire conversation has long stopped making sense to Chris. “I think you’re crazy,” he rumbles back with faux-scorn, his tone playful even though he sort of means it. But Eddie’s words must have done something to him because he feels his body flush with heat and he wants to untangle himself from the seatbelt _now_.

He has an intensely hard time believing in power structures after having stood near the top and looked down at the chaos. But Eddie’s piercing eyes and otherworldly ways of behaving make him believe that there might be something above him. Somebody in the world who only has to stand on the tips of his toes to reach God.

“I _am_ crazy,” Eddie tosses back with a nudge to Chris’ temple. “I ended up here, didn’t I?”

Chris groans when he feels Eddie’s tongue shoot out and lick a stripe up the hollow of his throat. The lips curve around his skin and start sucking, cutting off all the instructions he’s trying to send to his limbs.

“Hey,” he huffs, sticking out an elbow to push Eddie back into his own seat. “You better stop that. I’m trying to use spatial reasoning.”

He flicks his eyes warningly in Eddie’s direction, but the sight of the other sprawled out in the seat, smirking tauntingly with his lips shined by saliva, soften Chris really fast. He swallows and looks back out the windshield.

Eddie pulls his legs up into the seat, folding himself into a smaller shape. He’s still thin as the skeleton of an umbrella, jointed with rods and twisted at harsh angles. But the way Chris looks at him makes him feel like he’s seeing himself all wrong- unless Chris is just prone to making eyes with mangled husks that used to be human. Which he might be.

He lays his head against the seat, sighing in exhaustion. Green and brown flashes whip past his head as they ascend deeper into the wild. “Can you get to Mount Massive from here?” Eddie asks nervously, cracking his knuckles against the door.

“By car? Don’t think so,” Chris answers back, his eyes still prowling around the mirrors whenever they can. “There might be dirt roads but I think the only paved entrance is through the mines. It opens up after a while.”

Eddie reaches down into the satchel he dumped at his feet and pulls out one of the jackets. He drapes it over his front, curling into it like a blanket. “Is there time to sleep?” he checks, nestling the side of his head against its furry ring. “We can take turns driving if you want.”

A considering sound grumbles low in Chris’ throat. “No, you rest. I’m gonna have to dump the car soon anyway. You should sleep while I figure out where we are.”

He complies, but he doesn’t sleep as much as he shut off everything and just tracks Chris’ presence, absorbing the prevalence of his breath and movements. It is more restful than any dreams he could ask for. He even dislodges himself from his own body for a good while.

The clock reads around noon when his eyes flutter open. His stirring garners Chris’ attention and the blonde attends to him with a gentle, upturned brow.

And damn, Eddie never got the appeal of those nightgown-and-anemia housewives who lived dangled on their husband’s strings, but he certainly might now. The idea of letting himself fall to the mercy of someone who can coddle him, take care of him in every way, it’s… alluring to say the least. Intoxicating to say the most.

“So. Do you wake up with different souls?” Chris pokes at him, smiling.

Eddie rubs viciously at his eyes, clawing at the hard beads of sleep in their corners. “Do you wake up with the same one every day?” he mumbles back, blinking against the harsh light of the high sun. “Guess you’d know how to tuck one in tight enough.”

Chris brakes, stopping the car in the middle of the road. From the protests in Eddie’s sinuses, they’re either at a significantly higher altitude, deep into the forest, or both. They go deeper; Chris swings the steering wheel to the left and drives them right over the ridge and into wild.

The tires give an annoyed protest as mud squelches beneath them, but Chris forces down on the gas and rips them through the vegetation. Bushes and tufts of outgrown grass get swallowed up under the bumper, whipping against the side of the car. It shocks Eddie out of his sleepiness with a swift pang of guilt. Hopefully someone will find Lorenna’s car and return it to her after they’ve had a chance to melt into the forest.

Eddie unbuckles his seatbelt, bundling the satchel into his arms. He does a quick scan of the back of the car. There’s a blanket folded neatly across the back seat, plus some useless car equipment. He grabs the blanket. Then he twines his fingers around the trinket hanging from the rearview mirror and pulls, snapping the string. True, he doesn’t know much about spirituality, but Lorenna did, and maybe it will rub off on him.

“Are we good? Do you know where we’re going?” he asks, urgency in his throat.

Chris smiles uncertainly. “Tentatively.”

They leave the car and venture into the forest, each male biding his own memory of the last time he was here. For Eddie, it was a completely different life. The forest throttled him and threw him back out. For Chris, it’s akin to dissolving back into a nightmare that he knew wasn’t done with him.

But it’s easier now. Eddie is here. And Eddie has promised to have him no matter where he is taken.

It takes all day and a lot of endurance to climb through the steep slopes: Chris steels his body against the cold air. Eddie trips in the mud a couple times. They both rave a little, sometimes on their own, sometimes while inciting the other.

But when they finally find it, his eyes perform a gleam of pride. He whistles at Gluskin, smiling, and moves aside so Eddie can see where, in the distance, the mountains go flat and a watchtower sits abandoned on a summit. It stands like an elevated spider, its body reared into the setting sun.

“Oh thank fuck,” Eddie growls gratefully, slumping against Chris. He’s especially tired from the trek. He’s higher maintenance than he has any right to be, but given the shit that he had to tolerate to survive, his body is just about ready to go soft on him. Then again, it’s generous for him to agree that simply having access to a shelter is worthy of sating high standards.

Relieving Eddie of the items he’s carrying, Chris begins taking lengthy, energized strides towards the lookout point. Eddie’s body isn’t motivated in the same way. He groans and follows exhaustedly behind.

It’s going dark by the time they reach the base of the tower.

Chris grabs onto one of the metal rails and looks up the tall staircase, searching for any signs of movement from above.

He tries to mask the gesture as purely inquisitive, but Eddie sees the awe behind it. Walker stares up at the monolith and Eddie surmises that he feels a flush of supremacy. This is where Chris comes from. He is built of towers and 20mm bullets. He came out of the desert spitting blood.

“No one’s operated these in years,” he tells Eddie as soon as the older has joined him, shoulders slouched and panting. “It was an old system. I remembered there were red pins on the map for them.” His breath escapes in puffs of cold air. “They had this big corkboard to map it all out. Red pins for the towers, with strings connecting them. Then the tunnels in blue, each station marked with its own pin. And a big fuckin Murkoff symbol, right in the middle of it all.”

He feels Eddie place a hand on the small of his back. “Don’t feel too guilty about it, darling.”

They’re said with enough passivity to be fighting words. Chris turns to Eddie to assess his countenance, but the male is looking towards the tower expressionlessly. And even with all the muscle in the world, Chris knows he will never have this kind of authority. One of Eddie’s hands on his back, cold and sterile, makes him feel both afraid and empowered. If Eddie hadn’t been slashed to pieces by the asylum, Chris doesn’t know what kind of calculatingly dangerous man he could have become, a knife in one hand and a needle in the other.

They would have loved to have him in Bagram.

The hand slips away as Eddie travels lithely up the stairs, ascending the long neck of the tower.

His knuckles drag along the metal railing, the muted thump of his feet reverberating on the steps as he goes. At the top is a rectangular enclosure, just a box with windows that let him see inside of the room. It looks unoccupied indeed. He steps onto the platform and lets himself in through the door.

The area benefits immediately from exposure to the outside world- the air inside the watchtower is stuffy and stagnant, made worse by the clutter left behind. All of the old equipment is still set up around the desk on the perimeter. A microphone sits below a radio with a tuning dial, ready to report out, accompanied by a switchboard. The essence of a bed is pushed up into the corner of the room. It’s the only device Eddie really knows how to use.

“Do you think there’s electricity up here?” Eddie asks as soon as Chris steps through the doorway. The sun has almost completely set and though there’s not much other than acres of forest on all sides, it’s still a beautiful sight. But he’d still choose the lamp on the desk over the moon.

“Try it out,” Chris advises him. “Let me just cover us first.”

He drops their supplies and heads back outside to pull down the huge black shades that hang above the windows. They’re more like tarps than cloth, and badly battered by the wind. Small holes and significant rips will give their light away, but if they only use the table lamp, he thinks it’ll be enough to snuff out the dim luminance.

When he gets back in, Eddie has flicked it on. He’s standing at the filing cabinet at the head of the bed, searching through sheets that were folded and left behind on the shelves.

He turns back to Chris, sighing with relief.

“Bed it down,” Chris permits him.

As Eddie tucks ten layers of sheets over the old mattress, Chris fiddles with the equipment, making sure everything stays silent and unplugged. It looks like his fingers itch to fire an impulsive message out of the microphone, but he doesn’t. He just gazes dejectedly at the familiar technology, focusing all his energy into switching on a small space heater hidden beneath the desk.

Lorenna’s blanket is last. Eddie spreads it over the top of the bed.

“Can I have something to change into?” Chris asks, stepping away from the control panel. “Just pants are fine. Something to eat too, if you still have it.”

Eddie gives a verbal agreement and sinks down to search through his overstuffed bag. There’s a bag of dried meat in his supplies, plus many iterations of trail mix. He doesn’t have to ask which one the guy prefers.

“Was it difficult?” Eddie wonders out loud as Chris shrugs and drops his heavy jacket to the floor. “To have them conscript you for the same work you tried to get away from?”

The heat rises to his face as he pulls off his shirt, then peels himself down to nothing. “I would rather you throw me off the tower now than make me go another round about this,” he snaps.

A splash of annoyance falls on Eddie’s face. “I wasn’t fighting. I was asking.”

Chris reaches out a hand to accept a pair of pajama bottoms. He pulls them up his bare legs and then sits down on the bed, putting his face into his hands. “Yes, it was difficult. It was awful.” He jerks his shoulders back aggressively to throw his hands into a shrug. “What do you think the fucking answer is?”

Turning his back so he won’t detonate, Eddie busies himself with searching for something of his own to wear. He angrily shucks off his pants and shirt, grabbing for the t-shirt that Walker discarded. It’s sweaty but they’re going to have to reuse clothes at a very near point in the future, and… he doesn’t mind the smell of Chris. The black shirt stretches all the way to his lower thighs. He wishes it would cover his burning face.

A shaky sigh emits from behind him. “I knew I was helping them do terrible, fucked up things. I knew if I said no, they’d just get someone else to do it, and they’d torture the living hell out of me as-”

“I said you didn’t have to talk about it,” Eddie snarls, chest hurting to hear this.

“Quiet,” Chris shoots back at him, a thick finger pointed right for his breast. “You got this started so you’ll hear the end of it. The entire time I felt like I was part of the thing that was hurting you. And I felt so god awful about it, but I kept telling myself one day there might be an opportunity where I could use it to help you. That’s what got me through it. That’s what kept me from letting myself become the monster they wanted me to be.”

Eddie stands still. With frail success, he tries to match Chris’ intense glare, thinking of all the nights they spent together.

There are a million things he wants to ask, things that will get his eyes teary. “What’s that?” he diverts instead, pressing a hand below his throat. There’s a patch of Chris’ skin that’s reddened by an irregular marking.

Chris looks down. “It’s where they burned my dog tags into me.”

Eddie bites down on the inside of his mouth, dragging his eyes away. “God,” he releases, fighting to keep the useless tears from rolling. “Everything gets worse. The more I know, the fucking worse it gets.”

Sympathy floods Chris’s face. He leans back against the wall, inviting Eddie to sit down with him. The older just stands, tracing his eyes all along the floor. Every second that Chris doesn’t know all the things that happened just continues charging the space between them. His body is grating uncomfortably against the truth. He is desperate for relief.

“They made me…” he unsteadily accounts, failing to meet Chris’ eyes, “I can’t. I can’t say it. Can I write it?”

“Yes, please.” The younger rocks forward at the prospect. “Please tell me, Eddie.”

Before anything else can happen, Chris gets up off the bed and walks hurriedly across the floor. He yanks opens the desks drawers and searches through them until he finds a notepad and pencil. In a blur he delivers them to Eddie and sits back down on the bed, taking up the exact same position. It’s all done very quickly, like he’s afraid Eddie might change his mind if he waits too long.

The best of Eddie’s vocabulary can’t be mustered up with shaking hands, but these words are already so loaded and harsh that he doesn’t have to. He marks down the key points and hands it over, paper torn jaggedly from the pad.

Eyes fly over the bullet points. Eddie snatches it back even while Chris’ eyes are still roaming over it, scratching it up between his claws. He sheds it to pieces, scattering it on the floor. His shoulders are heaving; he cannot take back being a victim now.

“Eddie,” Chris whispers, looking up helplessly from the bed. He just looks at the male, unwilling to fill the harrowed ground with unwanted noise.

“I’m sorry,” he finally cheeps. “I didn’t know they took it that far. I don’t know why, I thought there were things not even Murkoff would do, but there’s not, it’s never like that.” He digs his nails into the bed and lets out an angry grouse, face twisted in pain. “I should have fought them off, killed as many as possible. I want to kill all of them.”

“I understand,” Eddie tells him.

“I deserve it,” he thunders between clenched teeth.

“You do,” he affirms.

Eddie kneels onto the bed, taking Chris into his arms. He feels the male scramble at his flesh, seeking purchase against his skin. He finds it easily. Chris melts against his body, dissolving into sobs that wrack his entire body. His nails dig into Eddie’s elbows.

Carefully, Eddie closes his eyes and lets himself see the asylum.

There were a long ten years before Chris came. It was an empty, broken shell of a time, filled with therapists who did little more than poke at his brain. By the time they started using Chris, the experiments had gotten far more unbearable. But by then he had discovered someone to be safe with at night.

Chris huffs in distress against him, the panic palpable. Eddie tightens his arms. “It’s alright,” he whispers, pressing a palm to the side of Chris’ head and patting him soothingly. “You’re alright. We don’t have to go back. We can figure out a way.”

“I wish it had killed me,” Chris grits out. “I was too scared to kill myself. I tried but I was too scared. I prayed it would do it for me.”

After everything, Eddie is staggered by his own emotion. He cares about this man more than has ever reasonably expected from himself. He wishes he could make the world a more tender place for the people that he loves. He wishes he could transform into a softer thing for the first time in his life.

“I had nothing,” he shares meditatively, his voice intended to pacify. “My whole life, I had miles and miles of nothing. Just hairy bodies on top of me and rage in my gut. And then equipment and lab coats and videos.” He hums thoughtfully, raking a set of fingers over Chris’ short hair. “And then I had you. Miles of you. I love you.”

He hasn’t declared love to anybody since his wife. And even then, it meant little more than the obligatory pecks he gave to his mother upon leaving the house.

Now he means it. For the first time in his pitiful life, something had slid into place. It didn’t make a sound when it happened. He didn’t feel it. But if he presses his fingers around now, he _touches_ it, and he knows it wasn’t there before.

Chris’ arms coil around his middle. Eddie keeps a steadying hand on the side of his face and around his waist. The solider has stopped trying to claw his way out.

“I love you too,” he responds, voice weepy, “I want to protect you. I’m terrified that I will fail to protect you.”

Eddie purses his lips delicately. “Look after yourself for once, you self-righteous fuck,” he utters affectionately, thumbing along the back of the blonde’s neck. “I can keep myself safe.”

He gets up for a moment, untangling himself from Chris’ body.

On his feet, he can see the absolute tank of a man sitting vulnerably on the bed, his eyes flashed up expectantly at Eddie through thick yellow lashes. He was going to turn off the light so they could sleep, but- 

He leans over and grabs Chris by the shoulders, crushing their faces together. Chris goes down easy, back hitting the bed with his arms surrendered. He takes in a sharp breath as Eddie’s lips go hungrily to his neck, sucking at the sensitive flesh of the hollow of his throat. Chris gives a whine, the tail-end of a sob transforming into a warmer sensation.

The muscles of Chris’ upper arms roll pleasantly under his gliding palms. Eddie has felt all forms of lust in his life, but never this sharp desire to _please_ instead of demanding he be pleased. He feels heat throb through him as Chris twists and huffs in anticipation, pushing his body up to meet Eddie’s mouth.

Eddie runs a hand up his side, stopping at his nipple.

“Darling, can I pleasure you?” he asks lowly, running a thread of knuckles below Walker’s jaw. “Are you in the right headspace?”

Chris opens his eyes and spreads his legs. “Is that…?” he asks through the stupidness of arousal. “Is that okay for you?”

Eddie circles his thumb over one of Chris’ nipples. He’s never done this, no, not with any intention of free will. But no one has ever complained about his tongue in other circumstances.

“It’s alright,” he promises, rubbing a hand up the front of Chris’ pants. He feels the male’s cock meet his palm, its shape pressed thick against the bare fabric of the pajamas. Yearning and lust shoot through his body. He’s been hungry for this for years, never believing it wouldn’t disgust him. “If something is wrong, I’ll tell you.” He wraps his hand around the shape of Chris’ erection, squeezing it. It swell in his grasp. “And if it feels wrong, you tell me.”

By the way Chris bucks up into his hand, Eddie has a hard time believing anything feels wrong here.

As he pulls the band of the pajamas down over Chris’ hips, the younger’s hand finds the back of his head, clutching gently at his hair. Chris’ cock springs free, full and leaking. He takes it in his hand and brings it to his mouth, taking kitten-like licks.

He lets Chris direct him with the hand on the back of head, widening his licks until he’s running his tongue up the length of his shaft and taking the tip of his cock into his mouth. The motions escalate from teasing and tentative to intended to satisfy very fast.

Eddie is struck dead by the idea that he can render a man of this caliber so far gone. Before he wishes death on his enemies, he wishes a speedy and gruesome death on anyone in the world who could also get this reaction out of the solider.

“Eddie,” Chris pants desperately, “Swallow me. Please.”

When Eddie glances up, Chris is looking back down at him, his tongue hanging out of his mouth. And Eddie knows that he’s the one with a dick in his mouth, but he wants to roll his eyes back in pleasure.

Chris releases a satisfied moan as he wraps his mouth around his cock and starts bobbing his head. The hand on the back of his head follows along with his motions, pulling slightly on his hair. But it doesn’t feel like he’s being abused. He feels like he’s being loved. Chris is offering his body to him.

Eddie’s hollows his cheeks, sucking him as far down as his throat is comfortable with.

He hears Chris gasp, fingers tightening suddenly at his scalp. “I’m gonna cum,” he warns, fucking his hips against Eddie’s mouth.

Eddie pops his lips off, taking Chris into his hand. Slick with saliva, he jerks him swiftly through deft fingers while rolling his tongue from balls to tip. Chris gives a second gasp and then keens in pleasure, muscles spasming.

Feverishly turned on by the vicarious nature of it all, Eddie lets Chris have control over his head, dragging his tongue over his cock and milking the last spurts of cum. He feels electric and complete, just from this. He doesn’t know how he will stand it when Chris gets his tongue on _him_.

Chris is panting on the bed when Eddie leans back to see the wreck he’s made of him. The male’s arms are thrown over his head, his muscled chest heaving, his pupils blown wide. He grins tauntingly, mouth hanging open, at the semen splattered on Eddie’s face.

Eddie scowls, swiping a hand across his cheek. He grins back. “Should’ve seen the other guy.”

In a quick motion, Chris hoists to a sitting position and wraps his arms around Eddie, pulling him onto his lap. Eddie staggers against the edge of the bed, caught immediately against the other’s chest.

“Let me kiss you before you rub it all off,” he purrs, mouth warm and wet as he presses his tongue into Eddie’s mouth, the bitter tang of semen shared between their lips. He breaks away, grabbing Eddie’s face between two large hands and breathing heavily against his forehead. “Let me repay you.”

And _oh,_ this is a new sensation he could have never predicted: Chris holding his face steady and licking the flat of his wide tongue over his eyelids, the bridge of his nose, his cheeks, cleaning the cum from his face.

Eddie is dizzyingly hard in his boxers but he shakes his head against the two palms holding him. Chris’ thumbs travel longingly across his nose and under his eyes, tracing the wetness of his own saliva.

“Tomorrow you can try to fuck me and I might let you. But I’m too tired for anything right now.”

He thinks it’s a generous offer, but Chris’ arms tighten around his shoulders, pulling him in close.

“I…” Chris seems to think, stroking the back of his shoulders. “If you’re afraid… I won’t hurt you. Ever. I won’t do anything that you don’t want. I won’t be rough or demanding, I won’t bring you to the edge and leave.”

Eddie’s chest leaps at the mere mention of these things. They are so private, so deeply ingrained in him, that he feels like they should not be able to be seen. Chris shouldn’t have to know that his father raped him. He shouldn’t know that Murkoff brought him to and denied him orgasm again and again while recreating the abuse. But he does.

He draws back slightly so that he can see Chris’ face.

“I believe you, Chris,” he says honestly. “But my body doesn’t. But we can try.”

Chris brings his hands back to Eddie’s head, lower this time, fingers splayed out on his neck. He peppers Eddie with kisses, pressing his lips to the male’s face and neck. “Eddie, yes. Please.” He voice wavers between kisses. “Please let me try.”

Without realizing it, Chris has just given Eddie something he hasn’t had in a long, long time. He feels it as he shuts off the light, pulls the space heater close, and crawls into Chris’ arms to sleep.

It feels like they have time.


	17. chapter seventeen.  palm eater.

From the windows of the watchtower, the forest looks like an arena. Eddie tries to cover every inch of terrain available from his vantagepoint, but he can’t find a scale that works. He’s never seen anything of this grandiosity.

All the same, with his fingers stiff from the morning chill and the blanket wrapped around his shoulders, he leans over the desk and tries to draw a map of the landmarks he can see. There’s a lake to west, then a rocky area that appears in an eastern expanse of trees. Further up, the floral canopy ends abruptly, giving way to the brown, flat lands of the mountains.

On the platform outside of the tower, Chris flicks at the thermometer and comes back inside. He walks close to Eddie and slides his arms around him, leaning over his shoulder to see the doodled map.

“Last night was cloudy,” he notes, picking the pen out from Gluskin’s fingers. He scrawls a loop in the middle of Eddie’s drawing of the lake, the universal image of a fish. “And it looks like it’ll be clear all day. That’s a good combination. We should collect some fish before the lakes start freezing over.”

Eddie pulls the bottom of the blanket around his front. “ _I’m_ freezing over,” he growls.

Chris wraps him tightly, laughing. “Today will be warm, Eddie. Trust me.” He pulls back, grabbing a short-sleeved shirt out of Eddie’s trove. This one is white and not meant for a man of his size, but he stretches it over his head regardless. “I also haven’t had a shower since the police station, so.”

Turning, Eddie drops the blanket down his shoulders and tosses it onto the bed. “I can tell,” he responds, but he more bats his eyes than wrinkles his nose.

They learned to live with a lot of human filth and then to tolerate the harsh stream of a hose whipping it away. The present hygiene situation is fine. But as much as he trusts the accuracy of Chris’ tongue, he wouldn’t mind scrubbing his face down.

°

With the shoddy cartography in mind, Eddie walks in the direction of the lake. Meanwhile, Chris jogs laps around him.

No matter how much he tries to improve his body, exercise just makes Eddie ache while whittling him down. Chris’ body does it opposite. It gets bulkier. When Eddie stops to rest and take down a handful of oats, Chris pulls his shirt off and does sit-ups in the dirt. He jumps to catch a high-hanging tree branch in his hands, the rough bark grating against his palms as he pulls himself up and awakens neglected muscles.

“I’m not entirely certain that brawn is going to buffer Murkoff’s bullets,” Eddie mumbles. They’re walking through a tall patch of wild grass, splattered with deliciously bright flowers in indigo and yellow. He’s a little bit exasperated by Chris’ nonstop movement, let alone the fact that the male shows no signs of fatigue.

To his credit, Chris slows down, stretching his arms. “It’s not really about that,” he admits, his shirt slung over his shoulder. In direct sunlight, even Eddie is uncomfortably warm in his clothes. “I need to exercise to feel strong. It keeps my mind sharp. Makes me feel like I’m in control.”

“Why?” he adds after a pause, “Do you not like it?”

Eddie lets his eyes travel over Chris’ bare chest, where his broad shoulders taper down into a precise, rippling abdomen. “No,” he swallows. “I like it.”

He likes how even after a burst of intense labor, Chris’ breath is still controlled down to the last exhale. How that’s not how it was at all last night.

“So… you know how to catch fish, then?” Eddie asks when they start approaching the lake.

It’s not that large of a body of water, and marshy from the plants growing out of it in spurts. The way it seems to be scooped out of the wet dirt at the edge of the field is so natural that Eddie feels refreshed just looking at it. The water laps delicately against the shore, mossy blue tones sparkling in the sun.

“Wanna learn how to spearfish?” Chris beams at him.

Eddie looks back. “Uh.”

They strip in the grass right before the bank, leaving a mess of shoes and clothing piled on top of the ground. Eddie toes into the water, numbing his legs slowly until he’s waded up to his hips, arms drawn around his chest. Chris, on the other hand, sinks right in, crashing into water up to his jaw. He submerges and pushes back to his feet, pondwater streaming down his face. He spits it back out.

Cold but blissful, Eddie pushes on his heels and skids into the water on his front, diving below the surface.

He comes up with a hand in his dark hair, scratching through the matted locks with his fingers. Discolored rivulets of water pour down his shoulders, where he rubs his flesh with his hands, cleaning himself off in the best approximation of sanitization.

Chris hangs back in the water and watches him.

He could discover Eddie just about anywhere and not be stunned by his presence. Everything about the human is like a white-sheened, elegant reptile. There are parietal eyes peeking out all over his body. Maybe that’s how Eddie seems to adapt (and adapt hard) to whatever situation he’s placed in- why he looks like he has the deadly poise of a militia whatever the issue he’s facing down.

Even when he’s losing his head, Chris finds him otherworldly.

He is effervescent.

He believes in resistance and survival. His tail has been cut off enough times for him to die of bloodloss, but it grows back every damn time.

Chris swims forward, gliding through the water. He gets to his feet when he meets Eddie, slipping a hand underwater to seize Gluskin’s wrist. The older looks on curiously as Chris pulls his hand out of the water and turns it around in his grasp, examining it.

“I bet you could get one,” he thinks aloud at the slender display of Eddie’s fingers. “You’re keen on details. Focused. And you don’t seem like the kind of man who lets his prey escape.”

Chris blushes suddenly at the idea of Eddie holding him as his prey. He imagines Eddie with a hand wrapped around his neck, his gray irises flaring their cold outlook. It fills him with a million conflicting reactions, ranging from excitement to dread. He squeezes the fantasy out of his head.

Eddie regards him with eyes that look disinterestedly insulted. He turns his hands downward, sliding it so that he has Chris is his own grip. “You are correct,” he comments, “But not all of us had the privilege of being boy scouts and football players.”

An amused lilt hits Chris’ lips. “I mean. One of those guesses is accurate.”

He pulls Eddie’s wrist to his mouth and gives his veins a watery kiss. Satisfied, Eddie’s fingers let him slip away.

In the next few minutes, Chris heads out of the water and searches for a stick in the nearby shrubbery. When he finds one that’s long enough, he sits down by their pile of clothes and pulls the pocket knife out his discarded pants, chipping away at the tip until he’s created a wooden spear.

“Here,” he offers, wading back into the river and scaring off any fish that might have gathered in the interim stillness. He offers the makeshift device to Eddie, who has finished bathing in the murky water.

Eddie takes it into both hands, pointing it experimentally at the ground.

“Look,” Chris tells him, stepping forward to adjust the positioning of his hands. He guides Gluskin’s hands lower down the pole, showing him where to clutch it.

“Put it underwater,” he continues, “Straight between your knees.”

Eddie follows the command, embedding the sharp tip into the grit of the ground.

“See how the refraction is?” He points at the way the spear is not aligned with its own image below water. “Get used to that. The hardest part is not knowing where you’re striking. And fish are fast as fuck.”

The image of the spear seems to bend away from him below the meniscus. He could study it for hours and doesn’t think he could learn to judge the disparity without a reference point.

Eddie swings the spear up and out of the water. It creates a waterfall as it strikes it, jabbing it in the general direction of Chris.

The blonde jolts, jumping back and grabbing it on instinct. His shocked face fades into relieved laughter once he sees the nature of the attack. Eddie puts on the grin of an idiot and jabs once more at Chris’ heart. They’re both sent crashing into the water when Chris yanks on the stick and sends Eddie tumbling. Every creature within a ten-yard radius flees the scene.

Twenty minutes later, Eddie is standing with his feet planted in a shallower area, the spear held steadily between his hands. Silvery fish of the smaller variety gather around his feet, inspecting the odd appendage. Chris watches from a few inches away, keeping perfectly still.

Eddie tries to calculate where one of the fish really is compared to where it appears to be. He takes a shot and stabs the spear into the water. The group of fish startle and dart away in every direction.

He gives out an annoyed grunt.

“Good try,” Chris encourages.

Eddie gives him a gloomy look.

“Hey,” Chris calls to him with a catlike smile, not insulting Eddie by administering any more praising platitudes. “Watch this.”

He stalks off into the deeper part of the lake, hunching over until his nose is just skimming the top of the water. He lowers his arms below the surface, dangling his fingers tauntingly into the cold body below. Then he waits.

In an explosion of splashing water, Chris heaves back from the water, gripping a fish in both hands. It flails wildly between his twisting palms, trying to wrestle away from the male’s grasp. He wears the proud grin of a man who _knows_ he’s good and likes any opportunity he has to prove it.

“That’s absolutely fucking stupid,” Eddie bites back, tracing over the gleaming scales of the reasonably sized carp. It’s colored in tan and green shimmers, like it was formed from the groundwater itself.

“Fish are the easiest for me,” Chris offers with sympathy as he lets the aquatic creature suffocate. He holds it against his chest and brings it to shore. The feeling of it flopping against his bare skin, frenzied and dying, is not dissimilar to how he felt in Eddie’s arms the prior night.

He meets Eddie’s eyes in the shallows, holding the head of the fish against him as though shushing it. “I wanna catch another but it’s gonna take a minute. Would you be able to gut and clean this one if I gave you instructions?” he asks. “I mean- not skill-wise. Could you stomach it?”

Eddie makes a ticking sound. “What do you think?”

The animal has stopped squirming. “I think you’re softer than you admit, Gluskin,” he says impulsively, resonating the tone that his superiors addressed him with countless times. “I think there’s a shit ton of softness buried in you that you’re afraid to show.”

Prickling with annoyance, Eddie plucks the fish out of Chris’ hands. “I think you’re just hoping _you_ won’t wake up gutted.”

Chris looks at him challengingly, trying to rile his true colors so he can see what they look like on the surface. “I want to see what happens when you’re with somebody who genuinely is not afraid of you gutting them.”

“There’s a reason they’re not here to tell you the answer,” he snarls back, trudging towards the bank.

A cold feeling washes over Chris. “Wait,” he says with a hand on Eddie’s elbow. “I mean it though. I’m not scared of you.”

“Then you haven’t been paying attention,” Eddie snaps, gripping the fish in white knuckles.

Chris’ shoulders slump in surrender. “I have,” he insists. “Murkoff thinks they know everything about you from fucking you with knives. They don’t know anything. I’ve looked very closely at who you are, Eddie. You’re-”

“You both see what you want to see,” Eddie cuts him off dismally. “Whyever the fuck you want to see anything in the first place is truly confounding to me.”

Chris steps forward to take Eddie into his arms. He doesn’t know words for these moments. He only has his body to fall back on. But Eddie rejects the embrace, walking towards the shore.

“Wait,” Chris calls after him, trying one last time to keep him from slipping away. “Don’t you need to know how to-”

“My dad taught me,” he grumbles.

°

On the edge of the pond, Chris builds a fire. They skewer the two cleaned fish on the hunting spear and hover it a safe distance over the flames. They’re both ravenous from a day spent on oats. Eddie circles the bodies of the meat over the flames in quick rotations, nervous about the setting sun. They don’t need to make a pyre for all of Murkoff’s feral beasts to notice.

“I feel sort of like all the energy we used to get these fuckers isn’t worth the calories they’ll give back,” Eddie considers demurely.

“You’ll see,” Chris assures him, leaning back and letting the warmth of the fire wash over his front. Now that it’s grown later into the day, it’s starting to get frosty again. “Once you dig your teeth into it, all of the blood and guts and wrangling it took take on a hell of a sexy shape.”

“God, I know,” he says exaggeratedly, throwing his eyes in a devilish roll. Ever-strong, his morose center sits solidly behind the taunting gesture.

Chris knows he’s being bated. Eddie is trying to open up a fight to finish what they never resolved, but honestly, he doesn’t have the energy.

He reaches out and grabs the pole from Eddie’s hand, jamming it into the dirt so it’s angled over the flames of their fire pit.

“Please stop acting like this,” he requests weakly. “Stop pulling away from me every time we get closer.”

Eddie forces his eyelids down, anger wrinkling his face. He looks like he’s fighting with his own mind.

“I don’t want you to be close to me,” he admits finally, his voice nearly lost to the crackling of the fire. “I don’t want you to see what’s down here. I’d rather kill you now and be done with it all.”

Chris pulls himself closer, grabbing Eddie’s hands. “Stomach of iron, right?” he cracks seriously. Eddie turns his head away, eyes still scrunched tight, feeling how intently Chris is looking at him. “Let me give you some soul, okay? The one I was born with still sits with me now.”

Letting go of his hand, Chris lowers his voice.

The chair is at the center of everything. The very middle of him. There’s blood and flesh on the straps, fused with the wood, and now his soul has been forced to sit in it.

“I didn’t run the prison,” he shares, leaning forward even as Eddie denies him his eyes. “I wasn’t a guard. I was just called to that room when they were ready to get another guy interrogated. Didn’t mean I didn’t walk through and see the cells though. Didn’t mean it wasn’t the same shit as Murkoff. You been in Mount Massive for 20 years? You’ve seen everything I did, Gluskin.”

He takes in a deep breath. By the time it releases, Eddie is looking through squinted lids at him, the whites of his eyes licked by the fire.

“They’d get brought in and tied to the chair. Mask off, almost always naked, almost always pleading. You get to know people by their love languages. Some spit at you, some talk about their family in other languages, some cry rivers. It’s all begging.” He laughs dryly. “I didn’t give a shit about any of it.”

Eddie gives him a wounded expression. He reads the distress on Chris’ face and his own mimics it. “Go on,” he prompts.

He doesn’t want to. He doesn’t want to dredge this up. But if Eddie needs it, he will.

“Um,” he tries, clawing back into those memories. “They were mostly looking for answers about Taliban activity. More commonly Al-Qaeda. Looking for names of affiliated members, leaders especially, camp locations, terrorist hot spots, targets of planned strikes…” He pours through all the information he successfully pried out. “Some of them didn’t know anything. I’m _certain_ that a great number of the non-speakers were completely ignorant. But it was still protocol.”

He swallows, roving over Eddie’s face. He doesn’t see fear or pain. Just interest. A little sadness.

“I’d walk in,” he remembers, as though peering in on a stranger that wore his skin, “And they’d be bound to the chair with cloth wrapped around their mouths.” He swipes his fingers over the corners of his lips, recalling what it felt like when Murkoff clamped his own with metal.

“I didn’t say anything. I would walk up and start punching them. Sometimes the chair would fall over and I’d have to grab it and put it back on its feet. I always started with fists. It… came naturally to me. The idea was that once I’d beaten them up a little bit, I’d yank off the muzzle, and they’d be so relieved to have the option that they’d start talking.”

He gets up suddenly, breaking his position with Eddie. Distantly, he rotates the spear so that the underside of the fish get cooked evenly.

“I… I liked it?” he admits, looking at the fire. “I don’t know. After being on patrol in that god fucking wasteland for months, having a specific task was easier to stand. I liked staying in one place. I liked believing I was helping keep people safe.”

“You probably did,” Eddie murmurs from below.

Chris looks down at him, eyes wide.

“I just mean. You probably did help,” he repeats, folding his legs. “You probably helped stop a lot of attacks.”

Chris shakes his head and squats down on his knees. “Maybe,” he says exasperatedly. “But I equalized the suffering with my own hands.” He grits his teeth in mortification. “I tried all sorts of things. Fingernails, eyes, bones, sex organs. We waterboarded the fuck out of people and laughed at them. We poured oil over their fucking heads and lit them on fire.”

He feels sickness clench in his stomach, pricking violently at his eyes. He wants to die.

“And you know what the worst fucking part is? That _I_ stand here and feel terrible. Me. I’m the one who _did_ it.”

He gets to his feet, the motion erratic. He can’t stand to stay still.

“Something… something happens in those places,” he breathes, pacing the ground. “You get so consumed by it because it’s all around you. Everyone is being blown up and tortured and shot down and chopped to pieces all the time. Eventually your eyes close. All of them. Even the one in your mind. And you just want to please your commander when he gives you your orders because there is nothing else to _fucking hold onto._ You want your friends to stop being killed. You want to be in control of the killing instead.”

On the ground, Eddie pulls his legs in close and takes a deep, steadying inhale. Okay. Yeah. He might be scared of Chris. Just a little bit.

“Chris, I know.” He dares to say anything out loud, but when Chris’ eyes shoot back at him, they are starving for Eddie to say something and take the burden off him. He decides to be selfless for once. “I’m a woman killer. That’s what I am.”

He sighs and presses his hands on the ground. “I looked at women and saw weakness and it made me angry. So fucking angry.” It feels ridiculous to put words on these deep-seeded feelings. “I had such high standards. Now I see that they were never people to me. They were mannequins on pedestals and I had so many expectations. I wanted them to be better than men. And when they were imperfect, I wanted them to die.”

He snarls, unsure if it’s directed at himself or the reason he grew up with these values. “It’s disgusting. I’m absolutely disgusting. I disgust myself.” He digs his nails into the dirt. “I don’t think our souls have a chance in hell, Walker. I think God will throw petals into the air when we die.”

Chris feels his humanity twitch. He thinks Eddie is right.

“We need to stop Murkoff,” he says right as Chris thinks it. “I can’t give my victims life. You can’t go back to Afghanistan and un-torture those people. But we ended up here because of those things and maybe we can do something right. Make something out of it.”

Chris smiles sadly. He bends back down and takes Eddie’s face into his hands.

“I know nothing we do will be big enough to save us,” he says quietly, “I know that even if we succeed, none of our evil will be made up for. But we should still do it. We have to”

Eddie lifts a hand, laying it over the back of Chris’. “I agree.”

Darkness has almost completely fallen. Chris gets up and stomps out the fire, picking up the stick with the blackened fish.

They sit down and bite into the smoky flesh right off the pole, too hot to touch with their hands. Eddie’s mouth fills with the taste of charcoaled, savory meat. His eyes fill with Chris, chomping starvingly on the meal. All the blood and guts and wrangling… it is worth it when he tastes this.

°

Eddie lets out a loud sound of discomfort, choking as freezing crystals of air shed down his throat.

They’re almost home. He’s clutching the scaffolding of the watchtower for support, the metal biting into his hand.

“Sorry Eddie,” Chris chatters behind him. “Really didn’t intend to be out this late.”

In the dark, especially after swimming, the temperature has taken a sharp dive. Now the t-shirts that were refreshing in the sunlight are torturously thin. Eddie’s body is stiff with the cold, so badly numbed he’s afraid he’ll never gain control over it again.

His body shakes as he forces himself to climb up the steps, joints tearing from joints. It’s a herculean effort to make it to the top, but he does it because he has to. He floods into the room, the closed door having kept a little of the heat inside, and fumbles at the space heater with swollen fingers.

Chris reaches over and flicks it on for him, grabbing the blanket off the bed and pulling it around both of their shoulders.

“How- are- you- _warm_?” Eddie demands between violent clicks of his teeth.

Chris flinches when Eddie’s icy flesh brushes against him, seeking his body heat. The grate of the portable heater flares up, turning the color of embers. It starts blasting out with weak heat, getting warmer every second. The wait is unbearable.

“Numb,” Chris answers back, refraining from leaning dangerously close to the radiator and burning his skin off.

Shakily, they get to the ground and sit against the frame of the bed, clutching each other as they thaw.

Eddie squeals when one of Chris’ hands tease at his inner thigh, freezing him the fuck to death.

“That was cute,” Chris chuckles.

In a few more minutes, they’re back in the familiar position of Eddie seated on Chris’s lap, making out hungrily.

This time, when Chris’s hands wander between Eddie’s thighs, the older doesn’t jerk away. Dying of frostbite to sweltering uncomfortably in the blanket happens real fast.

“Why don’t,” Chris reasons, “You just let me try to make you orgasm? We don’t have to make an event about it. It doesn’t even have to be that good. But it would help to just prove we can?” He smiles, bashful. “Maybe?”

Eddie reaches down and runs a palm down the front of his crotch. “It feels…” he thinks, finally pinpointing the term that breaks everything down into its proper variables. “Vulgar.”

“Because of your father?” Chris dares.

“Jesus Christ, Chris, how would you like it if I brought up _your_ dad right now?”

Chris laughs nervously. “Yeah, okay. Sorry.” His attention wavers for a second. “Actually, I… I never knew my dad.”

Interested, Eddie cocks his head. “Yeah? Did he leave you and your mom?”

“Nah,” Chris responds. “My maternal aunt took me in when I was a baby and legally adopted me before I could form memories. I’ve seen my mom online but never tried reaching out. We had more than enough going on. There were five kids in the household. Don’t know what they’re up to now. Don’t remember how old they are. They felt like my siblings.”

Eddie looks compassionately at him, giving the words enough attention before he dissolves back into himself.

“It feels degenerate,” Eddie whispers under his breath, nearly too quiet to hear. “To be with another man. It feels like I’m depraved. Don’t you ever feel like that?”

Chris stirs his thought around, really giving consideration to the question.

“No,” he answers honestly. “I’ve been with all kinds of people. Men and women. Sure, I got pushed around a little for it, but I never really gave a fuck. I love bodies. Personalities. I love people.”

Twin pangs of jealousy and envy poke at Eddie’s heart, each appearing for their own reason. “I didn’t think there was any option other than being with girls,” he mumbles glumly. “Even when I felt nothing in my relationships, I thought it was normal. How can I enjoy something that was used to rape me?”

“Well, sounds like you weren’t enjoying the _other_ option either.” Chris puts a hand on Eddie’s forehead and smooths back his hair. “This is who you are,” he murmurs. “It’s okay that you are. It’s not depraved- listen. You can use anything to rape someone. I am nothing like your dad. I’m just a man too. That’s it.”

It’s not exquisite philosophy, but it makes sense.

“I’m just rather good at generalizing,” Eddie considers. “I get startled by everything that moves.”

“I don’t move,” Chris jibes. “I _grow._ ”

Eddie rolls his eyes, emitting a harsh laugh before he can stop himself. He must look so stupid to this man who has satisfied his desires for years without ever feeling shame about it. Chris is a paragon for exactly how Eddie wishes he could be.

“Take my clothes off,” he requests, keeping his vision on Chris.

The man’s eyes squint a little, pleased. “Sure, Gluskin.”

He takes two fistfuls of Eddie’s shirt and pulls it off him, flicking it onto the floor. Warm air blows against his back as he rises to have his pants slipped off, stripping him down to his underwear. He stands and kicks the clothing off his ankles, and before he can sit down again, he feels Chris wrap his arms around his legs and press his bulge to his face.

Eddie breathes out sharply and braces his hands on the bed as Chris opens his lips to suck him through his briefs, taking everything from his soft cock to his balls into his mouth.

His hips push back and Chris uses the moment to pull the last article of clothing down. He nurses Eddie to a semi-full erection, sucking so reliably that Eddie feels no concern about not getting an orgasm.

Still, he pulls away and sits back down, meeting Chris’ eyes.

“Don’t be scared,” the blonde warms at his reappearance. “What do you want me to do?”

Eddie’s arousal swells around that sentence. “I just don’t want to get too lost,” he answers. “I want to remember where I am and who I’m with.”

Chris gets off of the floor, pulling himself by his hands so that he’s sitting on the bed.

“Is that all you want?”

When Eddie rises to meet him, he slips both hands between Eddie’s legs, stroking him. Eddie runs his own up the other’s neck, praising him with touch. “Not all of it. Get naked and lie on top of me.”

Chris complies eagerly, shedding his external skin.

He returns to the bed where Eddie is lying on his back, pressing down against the front of his chest. He makes a rolling, satisfied sound, opening his mouth to take Eddie’s tongue.

Eddie glides his hands between Chris’ shoulder blades, steadying himself. Chris’ length sits hard and trapped between their stomachs, dribbling precum.

“Come here,” Eddie mouths at him, trickling his fingertips along Chris’ bottom lip. “Lick my palm.”

Curiously, with a ruminative rumble, Chris takes Eddie’s wrist into his hand so he can run his tongue over it. He pays special attention to the grooves of Eddie’s fingers, teasing him by lapping at the joints. Then he attends to the sensitive clusters of neurons in the center of his palm.

This is tame as all fuck, but it still excites Chris to a euphoric level. It’s new. There is nothing that Eddie could ask him to do right now that he wouldn’t consider. He wants to do all of it.

When his hand is dripping with saliva, Eddie brings it between Chris’ upper legs, slickening the inner parts of his thighs.

“Oh,” he soughs when Eddie slips his cock between Chris’ thighs, hitching his hips up. Chris smiles and runs another hand from the older’s forehead to the back of his head. He keeps it there, protecting.

Feeling himself enveloped by flesh pumps Eddie with the exact kind of warmth he needs. He starts thrusting himself between Chris’ legs, the friction of skin on skin made more pleasant by the wetness.

On a well-repressed instinct, he grips both hands down on Chris’ cheeks, prying them apart.

“Can I…?” he confirms, letting two fingers run over Chris’ hole.

Chris swallows, surprised, nodding. “Yes,” he begs.

Eddie fucks Chris’ thighs while circling the ring of muscle, testing the pull against his fingers as he presses one into the tight opening. It’s new. But it feels right. He feels like his body already knows what to do. He stretches until he can fit a second one in, sinking them down to their knuckles.

“Fuck,” Chris huffs against him, twisting on top of him. “Fuck yeah, Gluskin.”

He’s trying to thrust his fingers into Chris at a rhythmic pace, but his own body is dissolving into erratic pleasure. He fucks himself between Chris’ legs helplessly, body drawing taut.

“Wait,” Chris says suddenly, putting both hands on the older’s shoulders. “Wait, wait.”

Open-mouthed and spinning, Eddie pants at him.

“Let me make you come,” Chris implores. He leaps to a sitting position. “Let me do it.”

Eddie follows powerlessly, crawling over to Chris. He tumbles on top of him. Chris’ hand goes to his cock, jerking it between his fingers while rubbing it against the curve of his belly. It feels so good that Eddie’s vision flashes.

He releases in Walker’s hand, _finally_ , mewling with pleasure.

He’s never been treated this way, both in love and lust. It’s nothing like a forced encounter just as it’s nothing like his own hand. He doesn’t know why he was foolish enough to wait until now to feel this way.

“ _There_ ,” Chris purrs to him, delicately stroking his softening cock.

The air is heavy with satisfaction, even as it causes the older’s cravings to unravel further.

“Neither of us got fucked,” Eddie points out regretfully.

“We both did. A little.” Chris pulls him close, breathing in. He leans against Eddie’s ear to share a secret. “I would _love_ to be fucked by you, Eddie. If you want to.”

Eddie slants his head back, realigning after the flare of his orgasm. “What about right now, though?” he asks, pressing his lips against the bigger male’s clavicle. “You wanna come too?”

Chris considers. “It’s probably rude to make it 2 to 1.” He cocks his head and smiles. “But I really do.”

Eddie sucks in a breath like that’s the annoying answer. But he knows he’s already given himself away to Walker. He loves this. There are hearts in his eyes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so I'd just like to say I thought about writing about them pissing off the side of the watchtower perimeter but even that was too stupid for me. still, pretty sure it happened. canon.


	18. chapter eighteen. 10-03.

Miles upon miles of sterile, steel surfaces. And she didn’t know the Leadville police station stretched back this far.

Lorenna waves a hand to reject the cup of water the man offers her. It’s not an investigation any more- she’s sitting at but not handcuffed to the table, although the second they start believing her (or decide to firmly _not_ believe her) something about that will change. Right now, her cuffed hands are merely trapped in her lap, but she doesn't think they have enough certainty to charge her.

“Eddie _Gluskin_ ,” the male cop repeats back to her for the second time, incredulity still resounding in his voice. “Just let me make this clear. Standing for the murder of three Leadville men, you’re going on record claiming that _Eddie Gluskin,_ deceased true crime documentary favorite circa 1990, is responsible.”

An indignant glower pricks at the corner of Lorenna’s mouth. “I told you,” she says again to ears that are definitely listening now. “Mount Massive Asylum is illegally housing criminals so they can conduct unethical research, masquerading as an institution for the mentally insane.”

A shadow steps into the doorway behind her. The officer questioning her looks up at his partner with an angry grimace.

“This girl is either delusional or thinks I’m retarded,” he spits, squeaking his chair back and meeting the other deputy under the door frame.

“Uh,” the younger addresses him quietly, shooting her a quick glance. “She’s right,” he whispers, not far enough away to be out of ear shot. “The latents match up with his prints in the database.”

There’s a long moment of silence.

“… What the fuck does that mean?” the officer bursts.

Lorenna turns back in her chair suddenly. Both officers startle, whipping their hands out in front of themselves. She is not coming for them, even though her eyes are narrowed to the points of just-sharpened weapons.

“It means that Murkoff Corporation is being shovel-fed money to pull the wool over everyone’s eyes.” She’s ready to tell them her story again. She will sit here and dredge it all back up as many times until they listen to her.

The male swallows nervously, processing. “Those guys have sat up in the hills for nearly three decades and we’ve never had a problem with them.”

Lorenna leans forward. “You need to do an internal investigation. I don’t care what level- call the board of fucking health for all I care. Someone needs to go inside those walls.” She grits her teeth and faces back to the wall, letting her elbows come down on the table with frustrated resignation. “People like me were too scared to say anything. Now that I have, my father will die.”

The officers steadily circle back around, pulling up their chairs.

“Okay, wait,” says the older one. “Start over. You did nursing in there?”

She nods, ready to cover everything from her recruitment to the blonde who bulldozed into town and bulldozed back out with a black-haired tailor and his medical bills unpayed.

But first, she starts with the day that she began training, when the screaming started from the other room, and how they told her all she had to fear if she said a word about it.

°

Eddie wakes up shaking violently.

He moans in distress, clawing blindly at the sheets until he’s on his hands and knees, trying to make out the room, draped in blackness.

The dream still sits heavy inside of him as the details wash away. For a minute, he is a small boy, scared, alone, abused. His parents’ faces are fresh in his head: he remembers now how his father had the same shrill, dark contours as he does, but with more hair, and angrier lines around his eyes.

The loneliness stretches around him. Everything empties out. Shaking, he starts to weep, gasping loudly.

“What’s happening?” he hears a voice stir faintly from behind him.

Chris discerns his shape and jolts out of sleep, collecting himself into a sitting position.

“Oh- woah,” he says quickly, voice thick and confused with sleep. He pulls Eddie against him, pressing the smaller’s back to his chest. He exhales from his nose, the sound evening out as he wakes up enough to wrap his arms tight. Sweeping palms search Eddie, making sure everything is intact. Where he comes from, that’s the first thing to check.

Eddie feels instantly soothed, but in the way that makes his chest rip open wider.

Behind him, Chris himself is massive. Like a mountain.

“What happened?” the blonde asks in a raspy voice. “Did we do too much? It was too fast?”

Forcing his teeth over the next impending sob, Eddie shakes his head. “No,” he answers, the words wet. He resists them for a moment before dissolving into lugubrious tears. “I just miss my wife,” he whines, vulnerable from the nerves that his mind exposed while it was asleep. “I miss my mom.”

And Lorenna.

And how she had all of their qualities in a way he could finally tolerate.

Chris makes a sound laden with so much sympathy it breaks Eddie’s heart. Chris acts as though Eddie’s emotions sit physically in his own chest. They cross boundaries into each other, but Chris is such a force of his own that Eddie doesn’t feel like he could ever get lost in it. He’s never felt anything like this before. He could live a thousand more times and never get the chance again.

“When we go there, we’re going to die,” Eddie speaks out loud, curling up into Chris’ arms.

They both know it.

They’ll kill as many as they can, make as much noise as possible, destroy the equipment, and hope that the police will do the rest from there.

“If we go back and try to talk to Lorenna, they’ll arrest us,” he whispers. “We can’t coordinate. We just have to go.”

And if the police are already there, and they and Murkoff don’t shoot them down on the spot, then they will be wrenched away from each other anyway.

But most likely they will die.

Chris doesn’t speak. He’s crying lightly into Eddie’s shoulder too now.

“But you have awakened me, Chris,” he confesses to himself. “I die with my eyes open.”

Chris has always offered him comfort when he needs it. Now Eddie knows it has all been real, because Chris doesn’t offer any here. He doesn’t make up bullshit. He just winds his arms tighter and cries with him.

Slowly, Eddie stops feeling afraid.

°

So.

Much.

Sniveling.

He fucking hates the _sniveling_.

Screaming would be preferable even to this.

Hell, threats and streams of curses come at him fine, but when they’re like this: curled up and dripping snot, rambling unintelligibly to new gods and old parents, he remembers why he does everything he does.

Even though it’s almost two in the god damn morning and only the night guards should be here to witness the night circus.

Jeremy Blaire does the last patrol for the night, peeking through every set of bars. It’s the third-week rotation again, which means he’s charged with making sure everyone’s accounted for before he heads home for the night. They used to be able to move freely about the common room during bedtime, but now they’re confined to cells again.

Ain’t seen that in about ten years.

There’s a reason Mount Massive can’t have nice things and it’s because of patients flying out of the window the second someone turns around. Now they got a guy on the cameras at all hours of the night, sometimes in the on-site security office, sometimes down in the mines.

They’re down one man too now, down there.

He knows it’s them. He knows they’re still out there.

But what the fuck do they think he can do about it? He’s got his arms full of sniveling patients who need to be kept under lock and key every second they’re not in with the researchers or eating. All of his superiors have been promoted to other locations, dumping their shit on his head before they exited the building.

And his peers? Spineless. They get on their knees with their mouths open for their morning orders.

Whatever. Walker and Gluskin aren’t going to find they make it long anyway. Best case, they run, their instincts give them away, and the police shoot them. Incompetent pricks down in Leadville won’t even send up a report of recent arrests and it’s not like he can just walk into town to check.

He’s been trying his damned hardest to keep this place _open_ for the last few years.

But he doesn’t really have a choice, does he?

Murkoff doesn’t deal in anything other than absolutes. They’re not even in the country and still, the last time he tried to pull out, they knew exactly what clothes his kid was wearing to sleep.

Blaire would love to call down to the station and get the two carted back up here, but if he makes that call and Murkoff’s head operations are listening, it’s his family that’s going to be thrown under for it. This site is his baby. He’s been entrusted with it. He’ll let those fuckers run off and pray to the gods that he did a good enough job beating them that they never come back.

See if he snivels about it.

Mount Massive is only one of the operations Murkoff controls all over the world; it’s the only one in America right now, but there will be more. He’s sure of it. Germany learned their eugenics program from the US and Murkoff will continue the tradition.

The point is, he can glide through this for now, keep under the radar until everything smooths over. This has been a long nightmare, and in the chaos that ensued, lots of dead patients floated to the ceiling. But no more. Things are finally stabilizing.

Exhausted to his bones, Blaire rounds the corner into the hallway, finally finding quiet. He runs the ball of his pen down the list, double-checking that every patient was checked off as secure.

Two long-time security guards pass him as he walks, offering a low greeting. He nods, leaping at the fact they’ll be staying here while he grabs his backpack and heads the fuck on home.

… Except when he keys into the security office, a hail is crackling through the radio.

“What?” he growls to himself, forcefully dropping into his chair and swiveling over to the counter.

From this vantagepoint, he can see the interior of the asylum all around him. Black-and-white feed all over the hospital flicker in pixelated images above the desk, showing him the fronts of cells and the hallways where the guards are patrolling.

He pushes an old, stained coffee mug out of the way and snatches up the receiver, blurting “Identify yourself,” after another stream of “Mount Massive, Mount Massive, Mount Massive” cracks through.

“This is Chief Morrigan at the Leadville police headquarters,” the voice flares back.

He waits aggravatedly for a signal that the message is complete.

“Acknowledged, over,” he cuts in aggravatedly.

“There’s a huge issue here,” he says and Blaires’ entire world shrinks down. “Two fugitives we’re told escaped from your facility surfaced in our town; already, we have four open homicides and five assault cases. Now, I don’t know what goes on up there, but as you can see, this is a matter for extreme concern. Over,” he adds in the afterthought.

“What makes you insinuate they're from our property? Over,” is all he can grit out.

“Can't say anything more than this: we've received a statement from a prior employee questioning the ethics of your corporation.” The entire sentence is a power move. “Over.”

Blaire pulls out his cell phone and starts texting, teeth grating together.

“Mount Massive has had no runaways,” he responds, trying to talk and text at the same time. “Please contact the nearest station headquarters if your own is inadequate for a proper investigation. We don’t do detective work. Over.”

He regrets the second he takes his finger off the transmitter.

“Their names are Chris Walker and Eddie Gluskin.”

Blaire slams his hand down on the desk, sending the coffee cup rattling. Fuck. Fuck this fuck this fuck this.

If Murkoff listens to this transcript, he is dead. This is his end.

There’s a pause, then the officer says, “We will be calling over to the Lake County Sherriff’s Department to move forward an investigation. Please be ready to surrender company regulations and operations. We would also like to conduct interviews. Over.”

Blaire stands up, grinding his teeth as he texts furiously.

“Please acknowledge. Over.”

Blaire pulls the radio transmitter violently to his mouth. “Ten-three,” he spits into the receiver.

After a moment, “Acknowledge. Over.”

“ _Ten-three_ ,” he hisses before jamming the radio onto its stomach, trapping it on so no messages can come through to him.

He has to round up the men and figure out what the fuck they’re going to do.

This place has been going to shit for years.

Maybe Murkoff will take what he’s given them and let him go. Maybe they can finally close the doors on this place and once and for all, they can stop buzzling like a fly around Murkoff, who has other facilities to worry about.

A fly?

This place is massive.

This job is massive.

It rises up like the mountains all around him, piercing him right through the fucking soul.

°

“You’re at least right that they're hiding something,” the officer concludes when he sits back down with Lorenna. "Spooky place. Spooky people," he mumbles to himself after.

To be honest, he wants to hold her in custody simply because it feels wrong letting anyone go tonight, but he can’t. This problem is a million times more complex than a couple of dead bodies. They are not equipped for either. There’s nothing they can do until the sheriff’s department gets back to them.

"I can't and won't be charging you with anything, Hayes," he admits. "But I'd like to hold you in protective custody. Those two know where you live and they sound out their absolute minds. They might come back for you."

Lorenna’s eyes are sore and sunken. She blinks in distress at this officer. They’ve long since unlocked the handcuffs around her wrists but she still feels trapped. She declines his offer, pulling a sigh from deep in his chest.

“Murkoff was given reasonable warning. If not us, we'll make sure somebody with the proper jurisdictional qualifications gets a warrant, does some interviews, and figures out what the fuck is going on there.” He makes an exasperated sound. “I’ve been chief here for my entire adult life and seen nothing like this. How does something like this _happen_?”

She doesn’t know either, but she can’t wait for him to wrap his mind around it.

“Am I free to leave?” she finally asks.

The man circles his attention back to her, sympathetic.

“Yes,” he says regretfully. “Let me escort you out.”

She vacates the warm lights of the police station and walks back to her apartment. It is covered in the blood of the wounded officers- it smells metallic and looks disgusting, but she won’t have to tolerate it much longer.

She doesn’t know what to pack.

She is attached to so many things in this apartment. Her mother’s scarves and her father’s tailoring decorate the space. Relics from years ago, her first and last boyfriend's dishes are still the ones she uses every day. She owns the same basic set of items she did when she was a child, growing up in a single-parent household.

In the end, Lorenna doesn’t pack a bag.

She lies down into bed.

And when dawn is breaking, somebody grabs her by the throat and drags her out of bed. Another palm comes down to cover her mouth as it chokes the breath out of her.

It is what she knew was going to happen.


	19. chapter nineteen.  your mind, your body.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> we still out here // this is a bona fide novel.

The freezing, raw air of the morning meets the sky in clear colors. Pale blue sweeps over the tops of the trees, lifted to tufts of white by the scattered clouds, and tinted gold where the sun prods its way through the sky.

It's pretty. A very active part of Eddie plans to jump from the railing.

There’s enough sky to muffle the impact of his death. Leaning against the metal fence, he watches his breath spiral up and dissipate into nothing.

The officer’s guns are bundled up in the bottom of their bag, too. He could pull one on Chris and kill him faster than his brain would resist. Then Eddie knows he’d have no trouble ending his own life immediately after.

He doesn’t want to wait for fate to snatch him up in its giant fists and smash him around however it wants. He wants to get out of this, free and self-motivated.

But when Chris steps out onto the perimeter of the watchtower and presses the warmth of his body to Eddie’s back, opening his lips on his neck and leaning down to follow the dip of his spine, he knows something has already snatched him up.

His body is holding him in place.

He turns around and runs his hand down the back of Chris’ head. The male grins up at him, teeth sharp enough to rival his own.

Eddie is an extra-terrestrial being, dripping with an oily darkness, his eyes piercingly silver. Chris a war machine with skin buffeted by sandstorms. There’s red still sopping down his wrists.

Together, they are too powerful.

He doesn’t have to kill himself.

They can destroy Murkoff, mind and body. They have been training their whole life for it. They have been waiting to come together like this. No incentive has ever been so utterly intrinsic.

°

Lorenna knows better than to open her eyes.

Even when she hears the door lock behind her and is thrown from the arms that handled her, she keeps her senses turned off. She doesn’t want to see this place. She doesn’t want to remember it.

Her palms slide on the tiled floor below her. She opens her eyes then, only because she has to, letting the hospital room materialize around her. It’s cold and the gurneys have been cleared out, leaving just the tiled floor, the cabinets around the room, and the three men standing in front of the exit.

Two of them wear full-body jumpsuits, but the one in front is dressed in a proper suit. There are dark red circles under his eyes that look as if he’s been clawing at them. He breathes out of his nose and she can’t tell if he’s more frantic or angry.

“Hello Jeremy,” she remembers.

“Hello, Lorenna,” he returns, squatting down demeaningly. “So I’m gonna assume you know why I brought you here after all these years.”

She feels a fearful rolling sensation in her stomach, set in motion by the anger of helplessness. All at once, she remembers what it was like to work here, under extremely specific orders that were dangerous to tweak, let alone disobey. It had been so liberating to work for herself after being at Mount Massive. And now… she’s not here to work at all.

“Murkoff is limping,” she says between defiantly clamped teeth. “Let it fall.”

He laughs aloud. Gets to his feet.

“You know, I wasn’t 100% sure it was you. There are a couple of people we’ve recruited from Leadville. But I knew there was a reason my mind went to you before anyone else.” He looks at her, his gaze cutting. “Because of people like you, I have a lot to salvage. Now. The police. What did you tell them?”

She meets his gaze disobediently. “Everything,” she snarls.

It doesn’t matter- what she says, doesn’t say. It will come to the same end.

He nods to himself, amused in the most hostile way. “Okay,” he processes, “Okay. I’m going to ask you a few questions, and if you waste my time or ask me to repeat even one of them, I promise I’ll get a patient in here and have him skullfuck you until your bone fragments. Where are Gluskin and Walker?”

Lorenna leans forward, keeping contact with his eyes. “I don’t know,” she hisses. “They ran.”

“Ran. _Where_?” he counters, jerking closer to her.

“I don’t know,” she repeats. “They’re probably out of the state by now.”

“I need them _back,_ ” he roars back at her. “I need them here or I need them dead. They’re running wild out there, leaving tracks that Murkoff can’t afford to have lead back-”

“It doesn’t matter,” Lorenna laughs. She laughs in his face. “The tracks have been laid. They’re coming for this place.” She watches the color drain from him but she doesn't know why. He already knows all this. “And once they see what’s happening, it will be shut down.”

Jeremy closes his eyes, his mind whirring.

They’ve been so careful. After Murkoff’s main employees left him and his peers to take over, they were so careful. And now that they’ve failed, he will be blamed for it. He doesn’t know what they’ll do to him. This place is a birthday party compared to Murkoff at large. They will punish him in ways he could never think up for his most unruly patients.

He seethes in her direction but barks over his shoulder instead.

“One of you- I need Watts, Harrington, Orozco, and Wolfe called in right now,” he orders the guards. “Tell them to get on site in the next three hours or I’m hunting them down myself.”

He’s trying to be assertive, but his hands are shaking.

They are coming for him.

If anyone knows what happened here, and that it happened under Murkoff’s name- it’s unthinkable. He needs to stop this. He will do anything to stop this from happening. Lorenna’s life obviously isn’t worth it, but neither is his.

Then he points to the second guard.

“Get this bitch off my floor. Round everyone up and cram them into Block C,” he orders. “Wait for me. When I give the order, you shoot them. All of them.”

°

“You’re out here a lot now,” Chris notices, walking languorously onto the platform.

Eddie is wrapped up in layers of clothing. From his sweater to his shoes, to the puffy green jacket that he usually lets Chris wear when they’re out, he’s warm enough to sit against the banister and continue watching the sky.

It started and stopped snowing in the early evening, leaving a dusting of snow on the ground. Nothing bad, but it’s wet and the tower is overwhelmingly metallic, so Chris is nervous about slipping off. But Eddie seems to be planted quite firmly in his spot. He has been all day.

“It’s just…” he murmurs quietly, looking into the expanse of stars that shutter through the absolute blackness. “Really pretty.”

Chris follows him, both in placement and angle. He stands next to Gluskin and turns his head to the sky, looking at the swirl of activity. It sort of feels like he can’t properly appreciate the sight. He knows there’s not enough time fully ingest it. He feels that way about a lot of things.

“You’re prettier,” he says, angling his head towards Eddie. “All that, condensed into something so small _and_ it has a penis.”

The noise Eddie makes is between a scoff and a laugh, undecided. Still he is surprised by the things Chris says to him.

“Did you just call me an it?”

Chris shrugs. “The universe is an it.” He grins, turning away. “You know what I mean though. I’m just saying you don’t usually get to share bodies with something that ancient and overwhelming. Not in the way we do.”

“Poetic, darling,” Eddie crinkles. “But I’ve shared my body with a lot of things. If anything, I’ve accumulated more human filth than spirituality.”

“I like both.”

“I know you do.”

It’s quiet, the wind spilling over the trees in a muted rustle. Not even the lamp inside the tower is on to obscure the night sky. He wishes it was possible to stay like this. But due to the temperature drop, they’ve been confined to the inside more and more. They’re getting incrementally weaker as they subsist off rations of packaged snacks.

Chris looks at the bright yellow orb of a moon in the distance.

“I like you because you’ve… transcended everyone else?” Chris seeks the correct words, feeling stupid. “I don’t know how to explain it. You’re an evolutionary miracle. You’ve survived so much. You remind me of those fish at the bottom of the ocean who have eyes that don’t work and huge lights on their heads.”

He’s not sure what Eddie’s expression means.

“I want to give you a break,” Chris admits, “From surviving… I know that I have to protect you at all costs.”

“Because I’m an anomaly species?” It’s teasing, the way he says it.

“Yes,” Chris stumbles. “But also because you're so special. You deserve to know that instead of eating nails for breakfast just to stay tough.”

Eddie laughs. He feels flattered, in a swimmingly bizarre kind of way.

“Well,” he hums, “Not to fight you on it, but I like you because you’re _so_ human. You are so overwhelmingly human, but the way you embody it is endearing. It makes me look at all the things I hate and think that I might love them.”

“See?” Chris grins and looks out to the wilderness. “All those qualities and you can fuck them, too.”

With an eyebrow raised, Eddie faces him. “Then do it,” he goads.

Chris cocks his head, scanning Eddie’s face, which has grown a tinge more serious. “You want me to?” he asks, his voice curling with promise. “Right now?”

“Do you want me to ask again?”

“Yes.” Chris’ eyes go a shade darker, catching his bottom lip between his teeth. “Ask me for it.”

Eddie rolls his head back so he can look Chris in the eye. “I want you to fuck me,” he vocalizes without hesitation. He turns his hand palm-up, inviting. Chris accepts immediately, trailing his fingers up to Eddie’s inner elbow. Then he pulls him into his body.

Chris breathes out eagerly, burying his face into the exposed crook of Eddie’s neck.

“I…” Eddie swallows, letting Chris’ arms curl around him and roam over his lower back. “Even though I’ve done this before, it’s never been because I wanted it, and that makes me…”

It makes his mind and body feel pleasantly faint.

“I haven’t had something new to give anyone in a long time,” he settles.

He leans into Chris, who arches his front against Eddie’s and brings their lips together.

“Let me give this to _you,_ ” he counters. “Let me write over all the bad experiences you’ve had.”

Eddie smiles as though placating a child. “That's a frighteningly large proposal, but... it is what you do best.”

Dropping down to a crouch, Chris wraps his arms around Eddie’s legs and looks up at him with sparkling eyes. “I’m gonna open you up with my tongue,” he tells him, sliding his hand over the curve of Eddie’s ass.

They’re low on supplies of all kinds, but none as benign as this. There are ample substitutes.

Chris pulls the band of his pants down, slipping them under the fullness of Eddie’s cheeks. The frigid air stings his bare flesh instantly. It’s so cold that even the heat in his thrumming blood does nothing to relieve the biting frost.

Then Chris has both of his warm palms planted on either side of him and is pulling his cheeks apart.

Eddie flinches when Chris’ tongue, warm and wet, licks a stripe from his balls to his tailbone. He arches involuntarily into the railing. The sensation is heightened so much by the temperature change that his cock shoots straight up, veins humming at the sensitivity.

The wetness burns immediately when the cold hits it. He whimpers slightly, driving back to feel Chris’ tongue against him again.

The blonde delivers, lapping at his entrance with purposeful licks. At first it’s to please the sensitive swirl of muscles, but after a breath, he’s got both hands on Gluskin’s hips and is fucking him roughly against his tongue, working him open.

Eddie lets out another sound when Chris’ hands slip upward. One of his palms curls satisfying over Eddie’s cock; a finger pokes at his opening, stretching him in careful increments.

The combined sensations, (weather not being the least of them), are almost too much for Eddie. He feels helpless in these hands, ready to spill even though Chris is simply running a reassuring thumb back and forth over the top of his cock, and only has a second finger inside him.

He hefts out a sudden breath of freezing air.

“ _I’m fucking cold_ ,” he cries out, body quaking.

Chris laughs to himself and draws back, leaving him with a playful squeeze.

“Get you inside,” he mumbles lovingly, pulling Eddie along after him.

Shutting the door behind as they plunge into the warm interior, Chris expects Eddie to huddle up by the space heater and thaw himself. He'd normally have a chance to pull down the blinds so they can flick on the lamp and get in bed.

Instead, Eddie is voracious. He sheds his clothes the second they step through the threshold.

He leans down and pulls off his shoes so his pants can tumble the rest of the way down, then rips everything else off too. The male's autonomy and fervor goes to Chris' groin, making him weak with want.

Chris follows him breathlessly, raw lust crashing over him.

He presses himself to Eddie’s naked back and the older lets himself be pushed until he meets the first object of resistance, the desk.

Eddie slashes a wrist out and whips the radio equipment out of his way. He plants two hands and one foot down on the surface, slick and exposed. Chris lines up with him from behind, breathing heavily as he takes his cock in hand and adds one more layer of saliva for insurance, rubbing his length along the curve of Eddie's cheeks.

The older's face is shadowed by the darkness of the forest below, which is difficult to see in these dark, near-winter nights. Chris still knows he is lovely. Even in the darkness, he can see it.

Then, in the breath of a second, Eddie’s face is lit up by a bright light.

A hundred miles away, in the bed of the mountains, a sudden burst of light illuminates everything. For a moment, the dirt grounds of the mountain ridge and the green of the trees are as clear as they are during the day. A giant cloud of dirt erupts like rain, ballooning into the air and spilling grit over everything.

“What is _that_?” Eddie pants at the same time as Chris gasps “Holy shit.”

Then they hear the explosion.

It ripples from far away, a muted, delayed sound. The watchtower does not shake. Still, Chris feels as if someone has just rattled him inside-out.

He staggers away from the window, heart pounding.

“Someone just tested a bomb,” he gapes.


	20. chapter twenty.  jeremy's soul.

Lorenna holds back a screech as the guard pulls her up by her hair.

“Come on, lady,” he prompts as though expecting her to resist.

He doesn’t need to restrain her, and consequentially doesn’t bother to. She has teeth to bite with, legs to flee with, but in terms of muscle mass and training, she’s no threat to him. And she’s not stupid enough to let desperation overwhelm those facts. He puts a hand to her back and pushes her roughly in the direction of the exit, his face turned down in emotionless subservience.

With one hand twisted around the fabric of her shirt, he opens the door and they enter the medical wing.

The entire area is a jarringly old memory, reformed by the heat of denial.

Still, it’s just the same as she left it.

The hospital rooms are numbered, systematically increasing in size the further you travel down the wing. These first few rooms are where patients get placed when they have injuries and afflictions that those in her discipline can take care of. They are minimal spaces, crammed with whatever supplies the administration wheels in, with one or two beds per room.

Further down the hall are the larger rooms. The work done there was _not_ in her discipline. It is where she always heard screaming, and where she was when she began the long, frightful process of leaving the institution.

Once- only once, she passed by and found one of the doors propped open by a sliver. She’d snuck a glance through the opening, unable to let it be. The floor was the same black and white tile as hers; the room was set up in the format of any of the others, with the same purple-tinged cabinets lining the walls.

But there had been blood.

Gallons of it, both fresh and old.

A patient had been curled up on the stained ground, twisted onto his back and whining through his nose. Through the opening, she saw a man in the same white scrubs as she was wearing bend over him, marking places on his body with a pen.

Then another scientist had flitted behind her, his fingers clamped over rows of hooked tools, and shut the door upon entry.

They pass those rooms now, Lorenna hobbling along with the pace of the guard.

She lets the fear drain out of her head, giving her clarity. She focuses enough on feigning tranquility that she buys herself minutes of confidence, just enough to buffer her as the guard presses his name card to the double doors and unseals the entrance to the prison.

_This_ is not as she left it.

The asylum is dark and dreary, but it was never so disheveled as it is now.

Random pieces of furniture are tipped over in the lobby area of the third floor. Chairs are scattered across the carpet, lights are blown out randomly, glass has rained all over the floor. There’s nobody standing guard at the elevator. In fact, it looks like the elevator is broken, perpetually suspended between two floors.

Muffled footstep sound from above their heads, one flight up. She jumps at the sudden sound of gunshots.

Up the stairs, shots pop out in rapid succession. The distant sound of screaming follows in the aftermath.

It’s nothing like violence in the formula of a filmed scene. Lorenna feels cold and frozen with the chaos of fear. There is no flurry of action, only the unstructured sounds of death and terror.

The guard himself stops and braces, his hand twisting off the back of her shirt. He pulls out his own gun and finally humanizes himself with a shaky breath. She hears the fear in his exhale. She sees it in the bristle of his shoulders.

He points his weapon to the base of the stairs, muttering a quiet “oh god’ as he waits for straggling patients to fly down into his trap. She briefly wonders if he's never had to kill before, or if Blaire's orders were simply per diem expectations.

Nothing happens immediately. There is horrible silence all around.

Then there are more screams. What sounds like a stampede rattles the ceiling. Another succession of gunshots echo down the steps.

Lorenna meets the guard’s eyes in a horrifying moment of equality. He makes a strained noise, flexes his fingers over his weapon, and straightens. Then he turns and runs.

With the gun angled at the ground, he turns from the stairs and pulls the ID out of his pocket. Quicker than she could ever hope it follow, he flashes it for reentry into the medical wing and flees.

Lorenna stands in the abandoned hallway, ice rooting her to the spot. The screams are dying off now, one staggered gunshot at a time.

She could fly up the stairs and straight into the genocide if she wanted to, or jog down until she reached the boiler room. She could run off into any of the hallways and barricade the doors with furniture or climb into the ornamental chimneys and wait out as long as she has to. All of these possibilities cross her mind, but she doesn’t spend a moment thinking about leaving the asylum.

Somehow, she thinks she always knew she would be back here in the end.

Lorenna runs for somewhere to hide her body from sight.

°

Harrington is coming to help him later in the evening.

The rest of them have no sense of the problem; they checked out a long time ago and are now stuffing paychecks between their legs as they run further than Murkoff can find them.

He laughs. Murkoff will always find them.

Even though he knows he’s going to die here, Jeremy feels glee knowing that they will never outrun the hydra. When he goes out in the next 24 hours, his legacy will follow him: his undying loyalty to the company. Murkoff will have mercy on his family. The others won’t have that same comfort.

At this time of day, the first round of patients are out of their cells for block A lunch.

No one knows what exactly is wrong yet. The guards are still doing their routines- it’s a weekend, so there are no experiments scheduled. Jeremy has put out an alarm for everyone to come in tomorrow: the nurses, the guards, the security. Only the scientists will certainly ignore the call.

He needs as many of them rounded up as possible when the time comes.

He needs the smallest number of informed parties walking out of here tomorrow. He needs to make sure everything dies with this building.

Jeremy walks through a flock of open cell doors. He goes methodically, eyeing the solid white beds and grimy floors. These people threw away their lives. They just as easily could have been killed on site when they were arrested. All of them. Instead, they were given a chance to stay alive; it was more than they deserved, and they’ve owed it back every second they’ve been eating up Murkoff’s money.

He’s incredibly bitter that he has afforded the same fate as all of them, and _he_ never killed his wife or shot up a restaurant or ran a child pornography ring.

The cell area becomes hallway becomes door.

He swings into the common room where four dozen men sit at the benches, eating the cold lunches served to them by the guards.

Some of them chew with the food raised to their mouths by wrists clamped in chains. One has a guard spoon-feeding him from across the table. Some socialize like people, some bubble and gurgle and ramble to their meals.

None of their details materialize, though. He cannot tell one patient from another. They are simply a mass. And that just makes it easier.

He opens fire.

Jeremy goes for the few guards first, precisely poking the life out them before they know there’s something to react to. He watches the bullets land between their eyes in a spurt of blood. He's not as bulky as them, but trained tenfold. The last one barely has a grip his weapon when he dies. His expression is immortalized, looking at his boss with more bewilderment than fear.

If the loud noises weren't enough, the violence is. The room goes wild.

Patients jump from the benches and stir the mass into havoc, screeching loudly. A man with dark skin jumps under the table. Another with severe scarring starts wailing. One puts up his hands and tries pleading.

They are equally easy to kill.

His bullets pierce through the crowd and find marks everywhere.

It’s easy.

This is just a taste of it, and it’s easy. It’s what he’s always fantasized about.

His watch buzzes; Harrington has given him an ETA of 55 minutes and wants to know what the fuck to expect when he walks into the asylum tonight.

Jeremy won’t ruin the surprise. He steps forward and shoots the men as they break for the door, trying to flee the common room. A handful of them succeed, but he won't lose sleep over it.

Another set of them huddle underneath the benches, gripping the wooden legs. They’re not smart enough to play dead.

Thoughtfully, he stands over their bodies and lets the image burn itself into his brain. When Harrington gets here, he will help, because Jeremy will allow him to live. Then Harrington can run too, and he’ll see how far he makes it before Murkoff catches up to him.

Murkoff will never catch up to Jeremy.

They think they bought his soul, but he never had one.

The closest thing he had was a purpose. And now, a shit ton of that purpose is lying dead on the ground.

He’s so fucking relieved.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is sort of a buffer chapter.  
> in lieu of chris and eddie being in this one, I'll tell you the astrological signs I've decided for them in my headcanon.
> 
> ✰ Eddie is a Scorpio  
> ✰ Chris is an Aries  
> ✰ Nobody is surprised


	21. chapter twenty one.  important ghosts.

One of Eddie’s impassable truths is that he missed out on a lot in life, and that it was always his fault.

He’d proven before that that didn’t have to be the case; with small limbs and an even smaller worldview, he lacked in _no_ experience. Before the brightness was pinched from his eyes later in life, he was an active participant in his own existence, desperately filling his time so he could escape the horror of his homelife.

To make up for the empty pantries at home, he went to afterschool club meetings to consume books and numbers. Socializing came easily, too. It started with charming his instructors and ended in him charismatically fucking around with friends in the back of their cars, his feet propped up on the seat in front of him and a cigarette between his teeth, two rude gestures no one else could get away with.

Then things started declining around the time he turned seventeen, when he was too long-limbed to put up with his father anymore.

The sexual nature of his maltreatment had dissolved into swings fit for a more-mature victim. His body had caught up to his mental health by then, so naturally he was swinging back, getting his lip split open, getting his jaw bruised every time.

Boxing with his father just made him angrier. It made intimacy feel like a softness he couldn’t risk.

The first boy who showed him too much sympathy had gotten his teeth kicked in.

It had been Lionel in the boy’s bathroom, holding to his jaw an ice pack that he’d pilfered from the nurse’s closet. Eddie had bitterly shared a watered-down retelling of the event that had turned his face purple. It could have been his first kiss with a boy, but instead it was his first fist-fight on school premises, and had gotten him both suspended from high school and expelled from his friend group.

When he moved out after meeting Carmen, he planned on flirting his way to the top of an office job, into some position that would afford him wealth and power.

The mental image that he fostered was a mundane and yet thriving vision: casual friends, nights out eating and dancing, a vegetable garden in the backyard, children for him to take care of, an all-white wedding.

Then, after his mother died, he realized how badly he wanted to put his father in prison. Unfortunately, there was just no way he could dredge all of that back up and still convince everyone that he was who he pretended to be. And that burned too many holes in him.

All the easy things he wanted for his generic life (and all of the impossible things that his generation and mindset would never let him have) crested. His final spat with Carmen ended in her death. From that point, and for the bodies that came with it, his future had been thrown away. Replaced by the asylum.

Tonight, when Chris apologizes somberly and wraps his arms around him, Eddie feels the same twinge of loss that he gets when he thinks of everything else he stole from himself. He feels anger at how he reaped himself of all those experiences. Even when his rage redirects to Murkoff, it burns a path right back to him.

They’re small things.

How he will never know what it’s like to be fucked. How there’s not enough time to verbally share everything he’s been through with a compassionate listener. How he knows he will never cook again, or sew a dress, or even read a god damn book.

And then the leviathan: how he won’t get the chance to live with the first person he genuinely loves, and find out how that could have changed him.

Eddie nests against the warmth of Chris’ arms, encircled against the bigger’s chest.

Despite all of it, this is still more than he ever deserved from the world. This is more than he ever put in.

Chris has said that he doesn’t think anything they do will save their souls. On the contrary, if they are together in this moment, then Eddie knows some God must love him. Some corner of the universe must look favorably on them both.

An eternity of damnation will never override this moment. This is bright slash on his wasted and discarded life, and it has restored his mind and body in ways he never had the vulnerability to beg for.

Eddie did his best to burn his humanity into the ash of all his disappointments, but with elbows submerged deep in the soot, Chris dug it back out again.

Chris has saved him.

°

Again, Chris tears back the sheet of paper and tells Eddie to draw another diagram of Mount Massive.

Bitterly, he scrawls out the floor plan by memory once again, trying to overcome his most recent errors. He pretends he’s walking through a 2D version of the hospital, envisioning how all the spaces connect. The entrance, the guard postings in the main lobby, the stairwell, the main control center...

“No,” Chris corrects him, dragging the outgrown point of his fingernail along the surface of the paper. “There’s a camera point here, but no guard. And you forgot the emergency exit to the left of the ground offices.”

Eddie growls, annoyed. “I’m not going to remember this anyhow,” he points out shortly, “It would be better if I just followed your lead.”

With an eye on the guns lying on the desk, Chris places his palms down on the counter and leans over Eddie’s blueprints. “There are 30 rounds between the two of us. We can sneak but we can’t fight. No matter what entry we pick, the cameras are going to pick us up and it’ll be a race.” He rips the sheet clean off, offering a blank page. “Do it again.”

Eddie scratches up the paper with his pen, running a worried hand through his hair. The plan is to generate as much bloodshed as they can, knock out the electronics in the main control center, and make a mess that can’t get ignored.

The plan has… tiers.

If they make it into the asylum, the first round of plans is to take out all security on the ground floor. At worst, it would put a wrench in the intake of new patients and the appearance of the main entryway, where investigators would be stepping into first.

If they make it through that, then they’ll proceed to the back. Eddie has never been to the administrative area, but Chris described the security room in such detail that he feels like he’s drawing it from memory. Destroying Mount Massive’s most expensive resources is just another way to draw attention to them. That, combined with the massacre, will hopefully be enough to garner public interest and kick the doors open wide enough to see the bigger issue.

As far as their plans go, that’s the top of the pyramid. There are no expectations for fleeing the building once they’re done.

Fate doesn’t work that way and they’re not about to try and bend it more than they’ve already dared.

Eddie notices a hand on his neck, placed so naturally that he didn’t feel it happen. His wrist falters and he looks up; Chris is looking down at the structure of his face, not at his structural recreation of the asylum, but still he says, “You seem ready.”

“I am.”

Chris bends down and kisses the back of his neck. “I want one of your knuckles,” he requests in a low voice.

With a disbelieving titter, Eddie reaches into the pocket of his coat and pulls out the flat-ended pair, flicking them onto the table with a clang. “Yeah, and good luck getting them over your fat fucking fingers.”

But Eddie made them well, and the soft leather rings fit snugly at the base of the blonde’s knuckles. He flexes his hand into a fist, testing the sturdiness of the grip. It’ll compensate to make his non-dominant arm more deadly. Then again, it’s also nothing more than a gesture. They’re not going to be brawling skin-to-skin. Chris is demonstratively weaponizing Eddie _to_ Eddie.

A comprehensive inventory of their weapons: two guns with 15 rounds each. A fist on each hand. The essence of a knife folded in Eddie’s pocket.

And sharper than any of it, thicker than a cleaver and more precise than a missle, their love.

Alone, maybe the act of walking into death would be enough to sate them. But now that they’re together, there’s a reason to survive. Neither of them has said it out loud, and they can’t feel it in each other’s touches, but they are both planning to crawl out of the asylum for a second time.

There is… more reason to take a job seriously when there is a reward at the end of it. Together, they are the reward. And so they will fight harder.

Chris pulls up a screeching chair and sits down, looking out over the forest. They’re dressed and ready to go as soon as this is done. His eyes cut blue through the bright morning as he gives Eddie an expressionless regard.

Then he leans into the transmitting machine built into the watchtower desk and flicks the switch. A green light blinks on over the channel dial. Immediately, white noise crackles out of the machine, broken up by the occasional phoneme. He twists it through the static until a full voice comes in clear through one of the channels.

“-eadville Ranger District Office, identify who is seeking contact?”

Chris glances at Eddie, then leans forward and takes the microphone into his hand, squeezing it thoughtfully. “My name is Byron Orozco,” he reports steadily, “I work for the Mount Massive psychiatric facility.” He pivots in his chair, holding the transponder to his mouth. “In the next twenty-four hours, I will slaughter my colleagues unless an investigative team enters the building. Are you listening?”

There’s a pause, then an unsteady affirmation. “I read you.” The voice gives nothing and merely waits for more information to be offered up.

Chris’ voice curls over itself, growing rougher and angrier. “Our patients are experiencing negligence, torture, and wrongful death at the hands of our administrators. Among other things. I will wait for you, or take it upon myself. That is the end of my message.”

He reaches beneath the desk and pulls the cord from its outlet. After the prongs slap against the floor, it’s silent enough that he can hear the leather creaking around his fingers. Eddie is watching him.

“Well,” Chris punctuates, zipping the front of his bulky parka over the black shirt below. “Time to beat them there.”

°

Eddie has never ridden on the shoulders of an older brother or a parent for a piggyback ride. Likewise, he’s also never been carried like a wife through the threshold of a new home. Today, however, when he falls behind Chris more than once, clutching his knees, panting, and tearing off the heavy black coat that he’s fogging up, he gets both experiences.

Even with Eddie’s lagging, the younger seems to know exactly where he’s going and how quickly he needs to get there.

Most of the time, Chris is running it. Left behind in the grit, Eddie is left with the shocking impression that Chris isn’t as big as he always perceived him to be. Right now he’s just… rocky. His body is built like a machine that optimizes human anatomy.

Fuck it, he’s pretty damn big.

He can’t pretend otherwise when Chris has him slung around his shoulders like a pair of crumbled wings or a punching bag that he has to put back up. Chris’ body has all kinds of capabilities Eddie’s can’t even fathom, including carrying the weight of an additional person as he runs through the thickets of trees.

After about an hour of travel, Chris’ posture tips and he lowers Eddie to his feet, collapsing for breath.

The blonde sits on the floor of the forest, panting. He shakes his head and puts his hands on his legs, breathing in heaves.

“Feel like we should’ve hit mountain by now,” he comments. “Fuck. Dunno if it was a bad idea to make that call. Police end up in there and everything looks pristine, things might get desperate, fast.”

“Things are already desperate,” Eddie says, looking away. “For all of us.”

Chris looks up suddenly, slapping his palms to the ground. There’s an awed and vulpine curl to his lips.

“Feel that?” he asks.

Eddie looks at him, feeling nothing other than obtuse, but then he notices the ground. The dirt vibrates beneath his feet, so slightly that he barely detects it, and then settles again.

Springing up, Chris makes fists of his knuckles.

“I fucking _knew_ we were going the right way,” he boasts, grinning at Eddie. “You got your jawline, Gluskin. I got my instincts.”

While Eddie is scoffing, Chris thinks of the tunnels beneath their feet, a network of infrastructure that the world cannot see. And yet sometimes, in these remote areas, if you pay close enough attention, you can feel the tremor a heavy truck passing through them.

(Sometimes, when the anger conquers everything and Eddie forgets he’s a person, he can listen very quietly to notice the sadness and fear rattling around in his chest.

The asylum is a city below his skin. It is home to all of his most important ghosts).

They run for a lot longer, until the forest bends outward and the land changes to accommodate open space. This far out, the mountains are flat and perform sudden, steep ascents in every direction. Somehow, Chris can figure out where he’s going just by remembering how landmarks represented by shitty pushpins connected on a cork board. No wonder Murkoff wanted him. He is intuitive and intelligent, and scale means nothing to him. The massive and the small are the same.

(No wonder Eddie is desperate to keep him).

But when the spires of the asylum rise up over the horizon, just high enough for them to see the sharp points of the guard towers, even Chris fails to exist.

They draw nearer, the building disappearing from view again while they climb up a hill made of crumbling dirt and rolling topsoil. Eddie may have never seen the asylum from the outside, but the color scheme and brickwork is burned into his brain from long gazes out of barred windows.

When his attention returns to the present, he sees that Chris is glaring at him appraisingly. The disgust and anger burning in his eyes is almost the opposite of what Eddie feels towards the building. The older is just scared, his body numb with cold. He is different in that place. He is relative to his surroundings.

Standing on the top of the ridge, Chris ducks down, studying the hospital. Eddie crouches behind the safety of the crest, placing his palms on the ground and peeking over the highest point of the landscape.

“It’s too late to go back and find the underground entrance,” Chris murmurs to Eddie, eyes sweeping over the dark bricks and iron fences. He squints, boxing his shoulders. “But it looks- it looks like everything’s open,” he realizes, noticing how the fences are swung wide and how the main doors, always monitored and sealed, reveal the cavern of the main lobby. He looks taken aback. “What the fuck.”

Eddie glances at him. “Walker… I don’t actually see any police cars in the parking lot.”

Chris straightens, speared by the sun. “What the _fuck_?”

With an outstretched arm, Eddie stops him, grabbing his calf before Chris starts racing down the other side of the hill. “Wait, Chris,” he stills. When Chris looks down, the sun makes a halo around his scalp, darkening his features. He swallows apprehensively. “What happens if they reincarcerate us?”

Chris’ whole spirit seems to roll downhill, catching on Eddie. His eyes soften. “That will never happen,” he promises gravely.

“Why are you so confident?” he asks with bitter humor. “You’ll shoot me first?”

“Yes,” Chris answers, scooping a hand forward to run it through Eddie’s hair. “And if I don’t have bullets left, I’ll break your neck.”

“In that moment?” Eddie tilts his head, exposed and vulnerable. “You could really do it? You really could kill me, Chris?”

Chris’ vision wavers. Then it circles back around. “If I was able to survive being in there, I can do anything.” He looks remorseful, but his eyes are firm. This is a declaration of love.

Comfort fills Eddie. It’s a larger wave than if they weren’t returning to the asylum at all. “Alright, darling,” he acceeds. “Then I truly am ready.”

Approaching the building, allowing it to grow larger in his field of vision, feels like coming home to Chris. This isn’t where he belongs, but it is the place that his destiny arranged to meet him. The path he’s taken has whittled down to this point.

They get on the dirt road that leads into the front parking lot, trees rising up around them once more. It’s a straight shot to the asylum; the first gate is blown wide open, its arms spread for the two of them to sneak through. Chris throws a glance up at at the spires, noting the cameras watching them. For the sake of precaution, he takes his gun out.

Eddie follows, pulling his from the pocket of his jacket. He shucks the overcoat off his shoulders and leaves it on the ground, keeping pace with Chris. There’s an enclosure on the side of the road, monitoring and approving all the vehicles that approach the asylum.

With a breath, Chris races for it, his gun held out in front of him. He dives in front of the glass, weapon raised, but relaxes almost immediately. The chair is empty.

“No one’s fucking here,” he growls back at Eddie, feeling more confused by the second.

Grinding his teeth, Eddie holds the firearm at his side. “This isn’t right,” he mumbles. The sun is high, washing out everything with its brightness. The leaves that aren’t dead and browning are pigmented in vibrant greens. The bricks of Mount Massive seem to sparkle like the scales of a reptilian colossus in the distance. Everything is completely silent. “Something not right is happening.”

Chris hesitates before responding.

Looking at Eddie standing in the daylight, the male’s hair black and slicked back, his bones arranged in perfect order, his eyes full of emotion, Chris isn’t sure if he’ll be able to do it. If there comes a moment when he has to end this entire megafuck of a human, he might fail. His hands might pull him in for an embrace instead of snapping his neck.

He decides not to say anything back.

They step through the next gate, entering into the parking lot. There are a ton of cars filling the spaces, but each vehicle is empty. Chris scans their windows as he walks through, looking for signs of any employees.

“I…” Eddie says near the bottom of the steps, holding the gun loosely in his hand, “I don’t know if I can go in there.” He forces his trembling body to turn and face Chris. His mind is snagged on all of the needles they stabbed him with, all of the rape he was forced to watch, all of the hands they invaded his skin with. He has body memories of being in that bed, on those floors, against those window sills. It’s sunk into his deepest places. It surprises him that he was able to let Chris touch his body so many times without his mind melting from it. It _astounds_ him.

Chris takes heavy strides up the stairs, meeting Eddie and grabbing his chin. “Yes you do,” he tells him. “You know you can. Just shoot anybody you see. Destroy everything you can. You know the layout. You know where people are. And I’ll be right there with you.”

But something is wrong.

Eddie looks up at the propped-open door, his body shaking.

But what choices does he have? Turn and run? Leave Chris alone to die?

They tread up the stairs and then push through the doors together, leaving the warmth of the illuminated world for the cool, musty air of the asylum. It greets them, an assault on their senses. And it’s worse than usual.

“Oh shit,” Chris breathes suddenly as his eyes flick through the dark room, over the carpet, and across the main security desk sitting in the center of the lobby. “Oh fuck, what happened in here? What the fuck? What the fuck?”

Nervously, Eddie steps forward. He counts the bodies lying around the room.

They’re everywhere.

There are patients and guards gunned down all over the place. It’s more than just unconscious figures- there’s blood everywhere. It’s pooled on top of the carpet, splattered across the wall, dripping down the wooden desk.

“I think they were shot,” Eddie says quietly. There’s a guard slumped over the desk, his arms dangling over the front of it like he’s welcoming them to the asylum. Bodies are face-down and curled up on the floor. They look like they were running for the exit. One guard still sits in his chair, leaning unnaturally across the arm.

Chris drops his own weapon, unable to process this unanticipated outcome.

It looks strikingly similar to his own fantasies in which he storms into the place and blasts the fuck out of everyone with his machine gun. Except this isn’t revenge. This was a desperate slaughter, and he knows it was Murkoff who did it. He’s too late.

“We should…” He swallows down a mouthful of grief, terrified that he will cry if he doesn’t harden himself. “We should check another area. Just to make sure.”

He bends down and grabs the gun, but there is no more power in his fist. He feels empty.

They climb the stairs to the second floor, entering onto the next main area. Eddie advances, dipping left to step through a door frame that used to lock the patients’ cells away from the rest of the asylum. But there’s no longer a door at all. It’s been ripped off the hinges and is leaning against the wall. Here, patients are dead in their cells, still trapped behind the bars. One man looks like he was asleep on his bed before being shot through the skull.

“Chris…” It rumbles warningly from his throat. The older’s sorrow has begun stirring. Eddie can see it. It’s collecting in his eyes and thickening, becoming a desperate anguish. Eddie has to do something before it builds up too much.

Chris flings his gun at the wall, smacking it so hard that the metal puts a dent in the plaster. His hand balls over the grip of his brass knuckles and he starts smashing the metal shape against the side of his leg, breathing erratically through his nose.

“I didn’t think this would happen,” he seethes, rage crashing over him. “In a million fucking years? Did I think Murkoff would kill _everyone in their own fucking asylum?_ ”

Lowering, Eddie places his own gun on the ground. He stands with his back to the dead bodies, raising his hands. “Do you want to fight me?” he asks. “If you need somebody to fight, you can fight me.”

Chris looks sobered for a second. “No,” he says helplessly, his eyes drenched in sadness. “No, I don’t want to fight you, Eddie. I think we should go.”

“I’m sorry.” It’s a useless thing to say, but Eddie means it. “But darling. You were prepared to try. That’s not nothing.”

Miserably, Chris turns and heads down the stairs. Eddie grabs his gun as he goes, following the blonde down the steps. It’s not just the bodies or the mystery of what happened. The entire place feels different somehow, hollowed out. It doesn’t hold the structures of terror it once did. But maybe that’s just because he’s been free for what felt like a second lifetime.

They reach the landing of the main floor. Eddie passes off his gun to Chris, letting the younger pocket it defeatedly.

“Wait. We should check the state of the operating center.” He instructs Eddie with a head nod, veering them down a hallway to the right of the stairwell.

More keycards are required, and like before, more doors are blown open to let them through regardless. There are not as many bodies here. The hallways connect to more sweeping corridors, leading them through the back-alleys of the old building. When they come upon the security room, Eddie knows he didn’t have a chance in hell remembering this place from a couple of chickenscratch outlines. This labyrinth is endless.

This door is closed, but Chris pulls the gun out of his pocket and opens it with a bullet to the door knob, breaking the latch. It swings open and Eddie gets an inside look at the brain of Mount Massive.

There are computer stations set up everywhere. Eddie knows that one of them must have been where Chris was forced to do whatever they asked him to. As described, the cork board that diagrams the institution and its accessories is hung on the wall. All of the security cameras are still operating, too; the empty asylum sits on live film, black and white nothingness emitting out.

“ _Look_ ,” Eddie hisses suddenly, grabbing a fistful of Chris’ coat and pulling him forward.

In one of the cameras, a man is pacing back and forth, speaking into a walkie-talkie.

“Holy fuck,” Chris exclaims, staring into the screen. “That’s Blaire. He’s in the tunnels.” He turns to Eddie, infuriated to the point of trembling. “He’s the highest they fucking come, Eddie. I promise you that he did this. I stake my fucking life on it.”

“Walker,” Eddie steadies him, stepping forward to press to hands to his front. “Don’t stake your life on anything right now, okay?” He glances sharply at the video feed. “You said that we got transported into the asylum from down there, right? So what the hell is he doing? Gonna jump into that mine cart and run away?”

“Yes, probably. I mean, no, he’s probably waiting for a car- I don’t know,” Chris seethes lowly, reaching up to grip both Eddie’s wrists. “I can’t leave now. I need to go get him. I _need_ him to answer to me.”

Eddie feels small in Chris’ crushing grasp. Even so, his chest is blooming with a wrath large enough to overpower anything the younger thinks he can serve. He remembers all the times he was held down and violated. All the times they made him bleed and got into his head. And more importantly, he remembers all of the horrors they forced Chris to endure.

“I do too,” he whispers back fiercely.

So it’s settled. They go, walking hurriedly through the hallway. On the warpath.

Eddie pulls the knife out of his pants, unsheathing it and running the blade between two fingers. The last three times he killed, it was to sate an undying thirt. He hasn’t sat down and teased himself with the enjoyment of stealing a life in a _long_ time. But he will now. They will, together. It will be his last kill and it will be enough to quit it forever.

“Do you know how to get there?” he asks, shoes padding on the thick brown carpet.

“Yes,” Chris answers. His shoulder blades are squared, bristled with anger and boxy with motivation. Eddie has never seen anything so beautiful. Maybe Eddie will hang back and watch him become the monster he has always said he became in Afghanistan. Maybe he wants the monster be on his side for once.

They reach the end of a hall and Eddie knows immediately that they’re in the right place.

The door here is the color of silver chrome, industrial and heavy. It’s also wide open. A stairwell dips down into blackness, lit only by dingy pop-up lights placed on both sides of every other step. Eddie peers over Chris’ shoulder as the blonde wastes no second. He starts pounding down the concrete stairs.

With a hand on the railing, Eddie flies down after him, wary of the steepness of the descent.

Their footsteps echo infinitely. The air grows stale and musty, and seeing anything becomes a considerable feat. Eddie cries out a quick _wait_ to Chris, losing him in the darkness that has begun to swallow him whole.

In the faint light of the floor lamps, Chris’ hand stretches back to soothe him.

“Right here with you, Gluskin,” he says, giving him a gentle squeeze before turning and continuing down the steps.

After an eternity, Eddie feels the floor straighten out below him. He stumbles at the lack of another expected step, tripping right into Chris’ back. The younger laughs to himself, a quiet sound, turning around to feel his shape in the dark. His hands briefly follow the curve of his hips.

“Help me find a door,” he whispers.

From his peripheral vision, Eddie notices the hint of a lightsource. When he focuses directly on it, it seems to disappear, but he can definitely see it break through the thick, swimming darkness. “Here,” he says aloud, beckoning to Chris.

He feels the older walk straight into him, then put two hands apologetically on his shoulders.

Chris swoops past and begins feeling along the wall for the outline of a door. The shape passes under his palms, a noticeable protrusion. He locates the doorknob and pushes the entrance open, drenching them in the light of the underground tunnel.

They haven’t been in the darkness very long, and the bulbs installed into the post-industrial rework of the old mining tunnels aren’t all that impressive, but Eddie still squints at the visual invasion.

The walls, formerly constructed from dirt, have been replaced by steadier tubes of concrete to keep the tunnel from caving in. There’s a lot of ground space, most of it cement as well. Only the strip in the middle is still made of dirt, but it seems preserved for the sole purpose of accommodating tracks. A mine cart sits in the center of the tunnel; there are boxes from a canning company piled up close to it, suggesting its usefulness in transporting heavy supplies. Eddie doubts they want vendors driving up close to the building.

But that’s not all that’s down here. Eddie sees it before Chris does, his eyes going wide. He races forward.

That’s why when Blaire steps out of the darkness behind them, his knife finds Chris first.

Chris lets out a strangled howl when the knife stabs into the back of his shoulder, sinking down to the hilt. Jeremy twists it, the agony so great that Chris falls to the ground, crying out in pain.

Eddie whirls around, heart thudding against his chest. The man is straddled over the back of Chris’ legs, wrenching the knife into him. Every twist of the blade makes Chris scream out again, his face crushing against the concrete.

“Stop!” Eddie yells, patting down his pockets. His gun is gone. It’s in Chris’ jacket.

He steps forward desperately, his flimsy pocket knife in his hand, but Jeremy is looking at him tauntingly. “You come any closer with that pencil sharpener, I find his heart through the back of his ribs,” he warns. Then he stomps down suddenly, crushing Chris’ wandering hand under his boot before the blonde can reach the firearm in his pocket.

Chris screeches out, the sound shattering Eddie’s ear drum. He heard the bones crunch in his hands, the brass knuckles still wrapped around them. All of his fingers are broken.

With a careful smile, Jeremy lifts the walkie-talkie to his ear with his left hand. “I have him,” he says steadily like a man trying to keep a dire situation under control. He lets go of the transmitter, lowering the communication device. An affirming voice squeaks out, but Jeremy ignores it.

“Wow,” he says to himself, smiling at Eddie. “Fucking wow. If I knew he was going to be an ass-licking _retard_ -” He twists the knife, making Chris’ whines grow loud again. “And walk right back into this place, well then, I would’ve held off.” He looks crazier than any patient Eddie ever met here. “But this is fine. No turning back, right? We’re all screwed at some point. Why not now?”

Eddie finds Chris’ eyes.

Eating a mouthful of pavement, the blueness of Chris’ irises roll up to meet Eddie. He looks desperate, agonized and sad and scared. There are tears running down his face. Eddie knows that he sees the dynamite bunded up beside the cart. Three packages of sticks are tied up together, their detonation cords attached to the same rope fuse, which stretches down the tunnel and disappears from sight.

A sharp laugh snaps Eddie’s attention back to Mount Massive’s acting president.

“Harrington was gonna blow the place up from a safe distance and help me destroy all the evidence. Did you know you don’t _have_ to load a thousand blasting caps into a thousand boreholes to topple this bitch? With such an old building, we can wreck the infrastructure from way down here and send it all tumbling down,” he informs.

“You see? You see how dedicated I am to my _fucking company?_ I was gonna let myself die just to save Murkoff’s ass.” He pulls the knife out of Chris’ back in a spray of blood, jabbing it through the air. “When have you been loyal to anything _half as sincerely_ as I am to this facility?” he demands rhetorically.

Eddie drops his gaze down to Chris, who is still eye-fucking his heart in the worst way. He wishes he knew what Chris was trying to say. He wishes he could fucking do something instead of standing here trapped. He wishes it didn’t feel like Chris was dying on the ground right in front of his stupid fucking helpless feet.

“But now?” Jeremy shouts it so exuberantly that Eddie startles. “Now I have somebody. To. Blame. It. On.” He punctuates each word with a playful punch to Chris’ back. Muffled roils of pain come from Chris’ throat. “And guess who that be?” He smiles. “Both of you. You killed those people. You ruined this asylum. And you will be held accountable for it.”

At that moment, Blaire’s walkie rumbles to life.

“Alright boss. Lighting her up- in three… two… one.”

Jeremy freezes, starting at Eddie. Then he scrambles, jamming his finger against the walkie and slamming it to his ear. “No, no, no, no,” he yelps out, leaping to his feet. “Harrington, you co-”

“Alright, there we go. Godspeed, Blaire,” the voice says, still transmitting on his end.

With tremendous effort, Chris presses his right palm against the ground and tries to push himself to his feet. He falls immediately, crumbling to the ground with a sob of pain.

Eddie’s eye darts to the mining cart. He looks back at Chris.

He doesn’t know how long the fuse stretches on for. It could be a couple of feet or it could be miles. Either way, the flame will travel in seconds, at best. If he’s going to get Chris up, he needs to go now. They need to jump into the cart and speed away, far enough so the explosion doesn’t obliterate them both.

But he stutters.

Because if the asylum is destroyed, then all the evidence of what happened here will be too.

Because as much as he loves Chris more than anybody he’s ever felt soft for, he knows Chris won’t be okay with just him. He’s not enough. Chris needs to save his soul more than he needs somebody to love it broken.

Eddie blinks, giving the blonde a sad look.

He wants to grab Chris’ face and kiss him. He wants to hold him against his body and weep with him. But it’s like it always is: there just isn’t enough time. He steels himself. He gives the man who saved his absolute life a cold wink.

“I’ll fuckin’ see ya, Chris,” he states. Then he runs.

Fumbling, he gathers the huge bulk of dynamite and hugs it to his chest. He darts for the cart, flinging over the side with the bundle of sticks in his arms. They drop into the bottom of the mine cart and his fingers fly over the panel built into it, bringing the vehicle to life.

He jams his hand against the lever, hard enough to snap it, and the cart lurches. Eddie and explosives speed away on the tracks, barrelling away from the asylum.

Still, he tries to pull the rope apart. He tries to fray it with his knife. His hands are shaking.

Twisted on the ground, Chris watches as Eddie leaves him.

After a few seconds of silence, he feels hope balloon in his chest. Then, just as quickly, it pops.

A massive explosion shakes the entire tunnel, sending cement and rock raining down over their heads. The entire world convulses, shifting everything out of place. His ears ring, his heart breaks, and still the tunnel refuses to collapse and kill him.

Chris cries out in misery, face-down and sobbing on the concrete.

Eddie’s body, his rage, his unending drive to resist and survive and flourish. It has all been blown to nothing.

Chris’ world empties. Finally, he has nothing left.

Then he hears Blaire blurt out a delayed laugh, staggered by disbelief. In the next second, Chris is being dragged up by his arms, the action shooting pain through his whole body. It doesn’t matter. He is numb with grief.

“God loves me, Walker,” he boasts, shoving him roughly towards the door. “Let’s get you upstairs and interviewed, how bout?”

Chris doesn’t resist. If there had been any hope stored in any far-off part of him, he knows now that God doesn’t love him. God has waited Chris’ entire life to hurt him the worst way he possibly could. And it was effective. It was calculating and it was _effective_. Chris has been destroyed.

He lets himself be taken back to the place that he should have never left.


	22. chapter twenty two.  violence.

After the guard charged with murdering her runs from the asylum, Lorenna stores herself inside a utility closet and hides behind the mops, waiting.

Bloodshed comes for Mount Massive overnight. She only hears parts of it.

It starts with another round of scattered gunshots. People scream as they die. Their feet pound on the floor as they rush from danger, but she has no idea if anyone actually gets away. There’s so much screaming. Men beg and provoke and sob, but their words are all punctuated by the sound of shots. She can only wonder how many people stand behind Blaire and act on his commands. She can only try to count how many guns they burn through in those twenty-four hours.

Then, over the course of the next morning, she hears the employees come in for their shifts.

For hours, she hears the same scattered gasps. She hears Blaire disseminate a bullshit story about a gunman countless times, then tasks the staff with cleaning up the mess or returning to their proper posts.

Then there are more gunshots. Always more.

Later in the day, the building falls silent. She waits for another hour before finally peeling her exhausted body off the wall and sneaking a glance into the hallway. Bodies lie everywhere though she cannot claim shock. She shakes, her eyes jumping from corpse to corpse as she makes a break for the stairwell.

But before she reaches it, her eyes snag on the doors to the infirmary wing. She takes a deep breath and steps back, staring it down. In spite of her protesting instincts, her feet rocket in its direction.

The hospital rooms are decimated, just like everything else.

Nurses in their uniforms bleed out through their white clothing. In the rooms, she finds a handful of dead patients. There are even two scientists on the floor, and they were the untouchables, even for a man of Blaire’s status.

But they’re not what she’s here for.

She dives into one of the rooms, dropping to a crouch onto the sterile floor. With fumbling hands, she pulls open a cabinet drawer and retrieves an emergency first aid. It’s one of the kits she used to help patients when they were brought in with knife wounds or clawed-up faces or self-inflicted markings.

Lorenna wraps her hand around the handle. Wasting no seconds on fear, she runs to the highest floor of the building, going body to body to seek survivors.

She finds the first one in the stairwell, his body pocked with bullet holes but still alive, twisted in agony.

“Help me,” he whispers in a strained voice, limbs splayed out on the steps.

“It’s okay. Someone will get you out of here,” Lorenna shoots back quietly, bending down to help drag him onto the closest landing. She leans him against the wall and opens her first aid kit, pulling out a roll of gauze. Winding it around his significant wounds is little more than pressing a band-aid to them, but it’s all she has. She hopes treating the lesions will delay their impending fatality rates. She hopes that giving a person hope will urge them to hold on long enough to be rescued.

When she’s done with him, she races on, looking for anyone else who’s breathing or twitching.

She helps them anyway she can. Some of them will still die. But her hope is that she can try to extend their lives until the police arrive with emergency medical help.

There are a surprising amount of survivors. She has to turn around and repack four more medical kits before reaching the ground floor.

When she gets there, she can immediately tell that this is the site of the worst massacre. It’s where people went to flee to building, and where Blaire's men caught them like a waiting spiders. She doesn’t think she’ll find anyone here. Anyone who could have escaped already did. It’s quiet as the grave.

And then it’s not.

She hears a man screaming so loudly that both she and the asylum stand at attention.

The front door is wide open for her to escape through. She sees the parking lot, brightly lit and beckoning her. Instead, she runs towards the sound.

It’s Chris.

°

Jeremy dumps him at the top of the stairs, letting the blonde collapse in a heap of open nerves and decimated potential.

“You stay here,” he instructs sardonically, two fingers pointed at the mound on the floor. He starts walking away but snaps spontaneously, swiveling around on his heels. He returns to Chris and sinks beside him, frisking the front of his body. The shape of the gun in Chris’ pocket finds his hand and he seizes it.

“Great, thanks,” he undertones to himself, shoving it into his own pocket and heading down the hallway.

Blaire forced him to amble up the stairs, prodding him in the back with the hilt of his knife each time he took too long to extend his legs. Now, flat on the carpet, Chris lets his feelings bleed out with him, the sensation hot and sticky as it dries on his back. He won’t have to put up with it much longer. That thought comforts him. It soothes the burning pain in his heart.

He’s done his job. Jeremy can play with him as much as he wants, but eventually he will tire of it and kill him, (or Chris will dip into unconsciousness from the bloodloss and die on his own). Then he will finally be discharged.

When Jeremy returns, Chris is struggling to crawl down the hallway, dragging the entire weight of his body along by one hand. After ascending the stairs, he’s too weak to get to his feet again. In truth, it has nothing to do with hitting the limits of his anatomy. His instincts are telling him how to survive, but he’s too defeated to give them any power. He doesn’t want to adapt. He doesn’t want to get through this and learn to be okay.

There was a time in Afghanistan, when he first deployed and was just starting as military police, when he drove himself into a wall of razor wire after startling prematurely at the sound of gunshots.

A million pinpricks of pain had lodged into his body, tearing his flesh. He’d ripped himself away from the barbed net, falling onto his back in the sandy soil. None of the wounds were powerful enough to incapacitate him on their own, but together, they took him down.

Minutes later, two medics had come running over with a stretcher. One of them had picked him up, dusted the sand off his shoulders, and sealed up all the nicks.

This is nothing like that.

Jeremy manhandles Chris into the wheelchair that he rolled down from the nurses’ wing, but it isn’t to help. And this time, every one of Chris’ wounds feel bad enough to have already killed him. For the first time in his life, he resents himself for being so strong. All those hours of training paid off in the worst way.

He slumps against the wheelchair, pressing against it to staunch the bleeding. Jeremy grabs hold of the handles and starts wheeling him down the hallway, muttering to himself. He takes a sharp right into one of the empty rooms.

Chris has never seen this particular area before, though it reminds him of the one he and Eddie used to sleep in.

It’s a wide open space that was most likely used as a common room at some point. All of the couches and chairs have been shoved into the corners of the room, however, leaving the wooden floor vacant. A tall brick fireplace that probably has never tasted soot is crammed full with folded tables. On the east end of the room, the windows are tall enough to fill the area with bright sunlight. If the blinds were not shuttered, it would probably be able to make a patient feel like he was almost outside.

Chris realizes how beautiful this place could have been if it were a real hospital.

There are connecting doors behind and in front of him, suggesting that residents were intended to flow freely from room to room. If the corporate mongers hadn’t been in charge of this location- if bloodthirsty military organizations from countries no different than his own weren’t so hungry to subjugate everyone, then maybe people could have really been rehabilitated here.

As it turns out, that’s now how things work in this world.

People like Blaire park and lock their scapegoats in the middle of the room and pull their own guns on them, crazed desperation flashing in their eyes.

“I need to know everything,” he talks down to Chris, forming his words steadily. He is clinging to hope, just like Chris was a few hours ago. Chris recognizes that he will do anything to preserve it.

His heart curls cruelly. His chest flutters with promise. He will grab this man’s hope in his palms like he is going to stroke it, and then he will crush it between the fingers he has left.

Jeremy emits a ragged breath, starting over. “I need you to tell me everything that happened after you left. Where you went.” He steps forward once, twice. “I have to know who was responsible for the assault- no, more importantly, the murders. Was it you?”

His eyes run crazily across Chris’ face. The blonde narrows his eyes.

“Well?” he barks. “Was it?”

Jeremy growls out at the silence that lingers, darting forward threateningly. Chris braces himself but continues to offer nothing.

“Or was it Gluskin?” he continues, dragging his eyes up and down the soldier’s body in the most invasive way he knows how. “Did he go down to the mines and put the bodies there? … Did you _show_ him the best place to hide them? Because I doubt he knew about Barry with his own wealth of knowledge.” He shrugs as though it were a simple deduction.

“So what?” he taunts. “You told each other everything? Took turns?” He laughs to himself, a tittering sound.

The humor drains from his face when he sees Chris’ constitution, still as stoic and unflinching as a rock. “Answer me!” he bursts out.

Chris grips the arms of the chair, leaning forward. He feels faint and sick, his body swimming away from him, but still he doesn’t yield. “You will never know,” he snarls definitely, voice wavering.

Bouncing agitatedly, Jeremy flings his arms open.

“No, you see, that’s not the way you want to do this.” He smacks the length of the gun against his palm and the sound echoes off the floor. “Even men like you have a limit. When I’m fucking this gun up your ass and sticking my fingers into your stab wound, I promise that you won’t be able to tell me fast enough.”

Chris’ eyes simmer with hatred, his eyelids unbatting. He’s played this game too many times to be intimidated. He’s torn up the floor walking circles around his victims. A CEO doesn’t know how to taunt, to interrogate, to uproot his world until he’s begging to tell him everything he knows. Blaire is bad at this. Chris will win.

“I don’t care what you do to me,” he manages to speak, voice breathy. “I won’t feel it.”

Jeremy lifts the gun and shoots him.

He flings back in the chair, shrieking. The bullet lodges in his scapula and sends electricity burning down his body. He thought he maxed out on pain when the knife was rooting around inside of him and ripping him open. He thought his wires were torn out when Eddie died. He was wrong. There is always more.

“Seems like you felt that!” Blaire exclaims, throwing his hands up.

Chris makes sharp keening sounds, his chest heaving. Blood spurts out his arm and gushes down his chest, spilling everywhere. His head spins. He’s going to faint, and still the sharpness of the pain keeps him lucid.

The president marches forward and kicks the chair. It lurches, the locked wheels screeching against the floor. He stamps his foot down on the stretch of seat between Chris’ legs.

“Tell me everything _right now_ ,” he demands, looming over Chris. He presses the barrel of the gun into the male’s forehead.

A torturer would taunt him slowly, playing with his finer nerves and fears until he couldn’t take it anymore. Blaire threw away his shot almost immediately. He is killing his victim instead of destroying him, and now Chris has almost won. He has outlasted the torture.

Chris’ teeth chatter violently. In an act of brutal resistance, and with more energy than he knew he could call on, he forces his eyes to roll up to meet Jeremy’s. He curls his mouth into an icy glower.

“Murkoff ends with me,” he whispers.

From the slit in the door behind him, two eyes watch the entire scene.

Lorenna grips the edge of the doorframe, terrified. She doesn’t know what to do. Jeremy is swallowing down heaping mouthfuls of failure and steadying the gun against Chris’ head. The needle in her medical kit won’t take him down. The bandages won’t bring Chris back from a headshot.

Jeremy towers over the soldier, digging his knee into his chest.

Chris squirms, gasping in pain. He’s starting to waver in and out, thick bouts of darkness eating up his consciousness. The mouth of the gun presses its shape into his head; it’s more torment than he can suffer. He fades out again, forgetting where he is.

Warmth and ignorance wrap around him, nursing him out of this horrorfuck. He leans into the comfort. He wonders if he will see Gluskin there.

“Answer me or I’ll fucking kill you,” Jeremy shouts at him, pistol-whipping the side of his face.

Chris wakes up again, his body flaring with unbearable torment.

He goes down.

He’s thrashed in the face with the gun.

He goes down.

An iron pole smashes into the back of Jeremy’s head, cracking his skull and knocking his body to the floor.

In all of Eddie’s mythologies of Chris, he watched the younger emerge from the desert, wrapped in either the military greens of his home country or the hard-cut flowing fabrics of Afghanistani linens, covered in sand and spitting blood.

When Eddie comes out of the desert, he is spitting fire. And instead of sand, he is covered in dirt.

The construction pipe rolls out of his hand, clanging against the floor. Eddie caves, slumping inward. His entire body is humming. It starts deep inside of him and ends with his skin. Everything is gyrating. His mind and body are suspended in terrible vibration, ribs bruised from where he leapt from the cart and crumpled against the wall, legs wobbly from the debris that collapsed all over him, organs vibrating from the blast that shook them all out of place.

“Chris?” he whimpers weakly, stumbling forward through the haze of his fucked senses. “Chris. It’s me. Are you okay?”

Chris is delirious, eyes rolled back and mouthing softly to himself.

Eddie’s vision isn’t staying centered but he knows he’s not seeing things when Lorenna rushes into the room. He turns his eyes to her, panting. The skin on her face is red and bruised. She’s clutching an emergency container of medical supplies in her hand. He can’t get enough air to his lungs.

“Eddie,” she breathes out, rushing to the floor and throwing open her kit. She looks up at him, concern flaring across her features, but she looks at him like she’s drinking from a stream of fresh water. “You’re here too.”

“What?” he murmurs. Everything sounds small and far away.

“Help me. Move Chris away from Blaire’s body,” she tells him as she collects into her arms a suturing kit and roll of bandages.

Laboredly, Eddie unlocks the wheels of Chris’ chair and rolls him back. Eddie takes shaky, feeble steps but still stumbles, making the chair jerk out of his hands. The motion wrenches Chris to full alertness and he comes up sputtering in pain.

Then he sees him. He reaches out and grabs Eddie’s elbow despite the knife wounds on the right side of body, eyes focusing desperately on him. He looks at him like a man desperate to believe in an illusion.

“I’m dying too,” Chris hushes to him. “I see you in front of me.”

“Chris,” Eddie hisses back, “It’s not death. I’m here.” He grabs back, squeezing Chris’ wrist. Even through the discomfort of his ringing body, Chris’ skin feels soothing against his own.

The younger’s eyes roll closed. He slumps against the chair, unconscious.

Eddie keeps his eyes on Chris. “Why are you here?” he asks regretfully to Lorenna, refusing to let go of the other’s arm.

She rushes to her feet, clutching her tools. Before anything, she winds a thick gauze around Chris’ arm, trying to stop his gunshot wound from bleeding. Eddie is forced to let go of his other arm and step away.

And Lorenna, the nurse and the seamstress, begins to clean Chris’ injuries and stitch them back up.

“Blaire…” she recounts with a glance to the body’s indented head, “He wanted to know what I knew. He sent someone after me in the middle of the night.” She finishes weaving the sutures through Chris’ mess of a stab wound, then wipes it all down again with an alcohol pad. “He was afraid of Murkoff coming after everything he loved. They gave him too much power and he couldn’t manage it correctly. For that, he wanted people like us to take the blame.”

Eddie’s heart lurches. He knows it’s his heart, because he can feel everything inside him grinding horribly against his bones. “I’m sorry,” he says, so quietly that he doesn’t hear it come out of his own mouth.

Suddenly, the sound of police cars rip through the conversation, blaring from outside. Tire squeal against the pavement, coming to a hurried stop. He hears car doors close with a bang, the sirens echoing through the empty building. Eddie stiffens.

He rushes for Chris, pushing Lorenna out of his way.

“Stop!” she cries at him, wrestling for control over the handlebars.

The adrenaline of senseless indignance burns clean all the pain Eddie is feeling.

“Chris and I have to go _now,_ ” he states hurriedly, pushing once more against her resisting stance. “We have to get out of here before the police find us.”

“I can’t remove a bullet,” she protests wildly, slapping his hand when he goes again for the handles. “He has to go to the hospital. He needs immediate medical treatment or he will die.”

“They will tear us apart,” Eddie snarls helplessly, frustratedly incapable of anything. “They will send us back to jail. It will start over from the beginning again.”

Lorenna leans forward, locking eyes with him instead of her horns. “No,” she reasons unshakably. “Not for him. Chris didn’t kill anybody. If what he told me was true, Murkoff invented his crimes at Spindletop to get him into Mount Massive. He will be free.”

The deep humming feeling returns to Eddie’s chest. He feels sick. She is right.

“And what’s more, they _need_ him, Eddie,” she pleads. “I can only tell so much of the story. He knows what happened here. He knows what to show them and what it all means. Even if he could survive out there, he’s the only one who can make sure everyone is held accountable.”

Eddie feels his chest break with loss. He tries to clear his throat, the words catching.

“I’m not like him,” he whispers, folding his arms to make himself smaller. “I can’t survive on my own.”

Lorenna’s shoulders slump. She looks pityingly at him. “Maybe we can come back and find you, Eddie. Once everything’s settled down.”

Outside, an officer announces that they are entering the building over what sounds like a megaphone. Eddie darts his eyes at the window. His insides are bouncing. He can’t get enough air. He can’t gather control over his basic senses.

He steps forward to meet Chris, his love’s unconscious form slumped against the wheelchair.

Gently, Eddie puts a palm to his bullet wound, steadily applying pressure until Chris wakes back up, yelping.

“Darling, quiet,” he undertones, grabbing Chris’ chin.

He angles Chris to look at him. The younger’s eyes soften in delirious affection.

“I love you. I will see you when you’re feeling better.”

Chris’ face curls in pain. Eddie knows that he thinks he’s seeing a vision and it hurts him to realize that it’s not real.

He can’t convince Chris that he is real. He lets them go.

When they exit the room, leaving him alone with Jeremy’s body, his heart is still screaming for them to come back. He doesn’t want to be in this asylum alone. He doesn’t want it to end here, with his body grating against itself and his head all messed up and Chris so far from him.

Eddie turns to find an exit that’ll lead him into the forest, where he’ll be able to wait for Chris to come find him. He barely makes it into the hallway before collapsing onto the floor.


	23. chapter twenty three.  tenderness.

Eddie blinks himself back to life, surreal tones of blue morphing around his vision.

The world is blurry, growing sharper each time he blinks away the next film of haziness. He recognizes that a long, blackened period of time sits between now and when he was in Mount Massive. He’s not sure how long the unconsciousness lasted, just that it was enough to make him feel like he’s rising from the dead.

It wasn’t that bad. It didn’t feel like anything, being dead.

He looks down at himself, making sure his body is still there. He’s never so badly wanted his body to still be there.

But he doesn’t end with his skin. There are tubes extending from his body, elongating him. He knows right away that he’s not in Leadville. This is some other hospital, apparently large enough to allow him a bed in a private room. The monitoring screen fills the dark space with a bluish glow, the only source of light other than the hallway, which is swathed in bright fluorescents.

He tries to rise but his wrist snags, handcuffed to the metal railing on the side of the bed.

Eddie’s attention snaps back to the doorway. There’s a guard posted at the entrance, standing straight-backed against the wall with a bulge in his holster.

Pulse racing, Eddie compresses himself into the corner of the bed, getting himself as far from the light as he possibly can. What else would he fucking expect? Where else could he have ended up? And yet his heart still beats in his mouth, filling it with terrified tears. He can’t go through this again.

He feels it in every corner of him: he’s weak and unwell. His body won’t make it through another Mount Massive.

Then Chris slips into the doorway, stopping to exchange a word with the guard.

Eddie’s pulse goes from racing to almost entirely stopped. The male walks into the room, wearing the unreadable expression of somebody who's putting himself through a painful yet expected motion.

Eddie calls out to him and he stops dead, struck immobile. A million emotions flit through his face.

“Are you awake?” he asks, almost incredulous. He is standing back, like he’s afraid to break the delicate atmosphere. “Is this the first time you’ve been awake?”

Eddie uncurls from the corner of the bed, shakily pulling himself into a sitting position.

“What’s happening?” he stammers. “Did Murkoff find us?”

Chris smiles, launching forward. He turns and sits down on the edge of the bed, flicking out a hand to run it over Eddie’s shoulders. His non-dominant arm is wrapped and slung across his chest, useless from the shoulder-down.

“No,” he answers reverently, squeezing Eddie’s shoulder in his palm. The older winces; Eddie looks rough, his skin white and threaded with gray, like a marble statue that fell from its post. His eyes are still bright, though, filled with their unique spirit. It washes away a lot of the fear Chris has been white-knuckling.

“No, Eddie,” he broaches. “I have a lot to talk to you about that. We’re in Denver right now.”

With his unchained hand, Eddie reaches out for Chris, grabbing him around the chest.

Chris laughs, letting Eddie rope him into his body. He makes brief eye contact with the police that glances in, jerking back to put a steadying hand on Eddie’s chest from a distance. Eddie lashes out and puts his own over it, gripping him for stability.

“What happened to me?” Eddie asks softly, cutting through the euphoria of their re-aligning. His body isn’t thrumming with that horrible grating sensation anymore, but his senses still feel fucked with, like there’s less power to go around and fuel all of them.

Running his fingers along Eddie’s sternum, Chris takes in a breath. “I’ve been talking with your doctors. You were in the blast wave, and it damaged a shit ton of you, Eddie.” He runs his hand along Eddie’s jaw. “Multiple concussions, your eyes, your lungs.” He sighs. “I mean... I can get you a list, kid.”

Swallowing, Eddie looks away. He focuses back on Chris’ arm. “And you?”

“I’m okay,” he murmurs comfortingly. “They’re going to try surgery on my arm but I probably won’t get to keep it. It’s- it’s a clean loss. You, we have to keep an eye on.”

Chris comes back up with a subject change and only a semi-forced grin. “You know, I don’t know how you found that girl in the first place, but there were almost a hundred of patients who survived. Largely because of her.”

“What’s going to happen to them?” Eddie pulls his hand back and scrapes it through his hair distractedly.

“Resentencing and sectioning.” He sweeps his eyes up to Eddie’s face. “They’ll reevaluate whether they should be in a prison or a psych ward.”

The cold metal of the handcuffs bite into Eddie’s wrist. “Me too?” he guesses, voice bitter and defeated.

Chris flashes his eyes to the guard outside. He gets up and circles to Eddie’s front, planting both hands on the railing of Eddie’s bed. He leans down so that his voice doesn’t travel in any direction other than Eddie. “There’s been some conversation about whether you are who Mount Massive said you are,” he says extremely quietly, following along with Eddie’s understanding.

Eddie’s face curls in confusion. “What do you mean? Blaire-”

“Blaire was nothing,” he interrupts, his words steady. “Blaire and Murkoff are puppet and master, but Murkoff pulled out of the show years ago. He was just a dangerous man with a lot of power trying to run an institution that was no longer profitable.”

Chris looks like a man burdened with too much information, so he continues sharing what he now knows. “Murkoff still operates out of Europe and has its fingers in countries all over the world,” he explains. “After the failure of Mount Massive, they don’t think that Murkoff will attempt another operation on American soil, not for a long time, or at least not under the same name.”

“Who said this?” Eddie whispers back.

With his good hand, Chris seeks out Eddie’s again. “I’ve been approached,” he discloses. “These last few weeks, I’ve been blowing my fucking lungs out, talking to federal agents- Sorry,” he adds as an afterthought, “Shouldn’t say that to somebody with blast lung.”

“What are you saying, darling?” Eddie hisses under his breath. “They want you to track Murkoff across the world? Don’t they know how much fucking work you put into gett-”

“No,” Chris cuts him off again. It doesn’t bother Eddie. It feels so fucking good to be hearing his voice again. “They want me to work for them in other ways. And they are willing to believe that Murkoff altered your records, like they know they did with mine.”

Eddie’s eyes soften, glazing with worry. “That’s _stupid_ ,” he says a little too loudly. “That’s bullshit. You know it’s bullshit.”

“I’m not saying it isn’t. _They're_ not saying it isn't.”

After a period of silence, he knocks the bottom of Eddie’s chin to make him look at him.

“So what?” Eddie demands. “It’s a trade? You get me and they get you?” He scowls, turning away again. “And what about the bodies in Leadville, huh? I didn’t do that either?”

“No,” he says firmly. “That was easily Murkoff finding a way to get you re-arrested, since they couldn’t just come down and pick you up off the street.”

When he looks back down at Eddie, expecting to see him alight with the possibility of a new life, there are only angry tears in the older’s eyes. He strains his hands into fists, body rigid.

“Why is this so horrible to you?” Chris questions nervously, his heart drying up.

Eddie doesn’t respond for a moment more, gathering the whine out of his voice.

Finally, he clears his throat. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to just stop. I _tried[_. The second I was free, it came back. Almost fucking immediately. I wanted to kill and I didn’t stop myself. I don’t know if that will ever go away.”

With shallow humor, Chris shrugs. “I don’t know, Gluskin. Those were a lot of concussions. Maybe something changed.” His words fall flat, even on his own ears. “And… you will be watched very closely. If that makes a difference at all.”

Eddie folds his eyelids down, frowning. “I don’t _know_ if it will happen again. I’m not saying it would. But if it does, you will hold yourself responsible. You’re a sorry fuck and you never forgive yourself.”

Chris smiles. “You’re the same way. You deserve a second chance. If I'm getting one, then you sure as fuck do too.”

Eddie knows that Chris is putting his head aside for his want. And maybe Eddie would be able to but his want aside for his head. Maybe it could be different. But to have all of those murders washed away as though he was never responsible… he doesn’t know how he could ever begin to deal with that.

But how does prison absolve him? How does a life sentence wash it away either?

“Let’s just see how your recovery goes, okay?” Chris offers, quieting his mind. “Let’s do that first.”

With a shaky breath, Eddie nods.

“Eddie,” he speaks, gathering Eddie’s entire world into his arms. He shakes his head. “Nothing compares.”

Eddie focuses on him. Life has been kinder to him than he ever deserved. If he could learn to keep his head where it should be, this could always be enough for him. Chris is his beacon. Nothing compares.

°

Eddie sits at the desk in Lorenna’s shop, sewing closed the arm of a shirt.

Sitting on the floor by the doorway, Chris balances a laptop on his thighs and runs through all of the connecting trains they’ll be taking. It will be a couple days before they get to Illinois from Colorado, but he’s always liked trains. They’re a lot gentler than the technology he’s used to working with.

“Okay, darling, this one is done,” Eddie murmurs from the front desk, folding the shirt down. He picks up one of the long sleeved ones and starts cutting back the left sleeve to bind it at the joint. “What am I going to do with myself in Chicago, anyway? _This?_ ” he muses as an afterthought.

“You wear housewife well,” Chris purrs tauntingly, flicking his eyes up with a shelf of sharpened teeth reinforced below them.

Eddie lets go of the shirt and looks back at him, angling his head threateningly. Dark oil burns through his gaze. To stare it down sort of scares Chris, but then again, it also stirs him. He’s not afraid of Eddie’s darkness, just.... a little aroused by it.

Chris closes the computer, standing up. “Listen, Gluskin, I’m just testing your impulse control.”

“Mmm, that’s not how you want to do it,” he returns, snapping the thread from the spool with his teeth. “I might start sewing up both your arm holes in preparation of ripping off the other one.”

Laughing, Chris walks over to him. He cups Eddie’s face, running a thumb over his features. He’s beautiful, and even in the violence of their histories and the words they exchange, he only finds tenderness here: the feeling of Gluskin’s eyelashes brushing his finger when he blinks.

“You would be very sad if I lost both my hands,” he points out with a squeeze to Eddie’s chin for emphasis. “And what’s more, you can do absoltely anything you want to. I’ll write you a fake resume.”

Eddie reaches up to pull Chris’ hand to his lips. He runs the flat of his tongue along the male’s knuckles.

“Nevermind, darling,” he finally caves, speaking softly. “I’ll be the first to admit that I _am_ a pretty good housewife.”

In the next hour, they’re up in Eddie’s old room at the apex of the tailor shop. Their bags are down below, stacked at the door and ready for the morning. They’ll say goodbye to Lorenna and then work their way to Chicago, where they’ll be met immediately by Chris' new superior.

“I’m really appreciative that Lorenna let us stay here, but it’s fucking weird,” he mutters to himself as he opens up his old closet and sees the mass of packaged food he stored there in case he ever began starving to death. There was once a dead body on the floor right where he’s standing. He doesn’t know if he will ever get better than he was. He doesn’t know if he _is_ better.

He feels better, at least.

After being dragged through a million x-rays and ultrasounds and rehabilitation programs, he’s almost too drained to hold onto anger. It sort of feels like that rageful creature inside him was blown to nothing when he leapt from the explosion. He doesn’t feel it rotting between his ribs, but he doesn’t feel it demanding to be fed either.

He feels okay. Right now, he even feels content.

Afraid to turn off the light completely, Eddie throws a shirt over the lampshade to dull it, sitting down on Chris’ lap.

The younger runs his arm up Eddie’s back and into his hair.

“I’m sorry,” he apologizes for the millionth time. “I’ll have something attached to the other side soon.”

“A fucking club, maybe, to make it easier on you,” Eddie smiles, running a hand over the place where Chris’ left shoulder ends in a wall of bandages.

The younger sucks in his breath at the sensitivity of the still-healing wound.

“Yeah, well, my doctor was saying they’re developing a prosthetic hand where you can move the fucking _fingers_. That’s some shit, Gluskin.”

Eddie kisses him, wrapping his legs around his torso. “I won’t mind if it’s less sophisticated. You’ve never been about precision.”

Chris’ hand slips down to hold Eddie by the back of his neck. “I’ve always been about precision,” he contends, not completely unoffended, dipping down to run his mouth along Eddie’s pulse. “An effective torturer deals in administering very careful attention to each nerve.” He cocks his head, flicking his eyes back up to meet the other’s. “An effective lover, too.”

Eddie leans back, sweeping his eyes over Chris’ face. “Did you really just imply that _torturing_ made you better at sex?”

Caught off guard, Chris looks away sheepishly. “No,” he stumbles. “I’m just saying… it happened. And now I’m here.”

Eddie soughs at Chris in mock-pity, pulling him back into his arms. “You’re right about that, darling.”

A bang in the form of the front door jangling open comes from downstairs, interrupting them. A pair of feet tread into the storefront, small but powerful.

“Oh,” Eddie thinks aloud, “Lorenna probably came in to get some things done while the shop is closed.”

Smoothing a hand down Eddie’s hair, Chris smiles at him. “You wanna go see her?”

Eddie shakes his head. “No. We’ll see her in the morning. I want to be with you.” He wraps his arms back around Chris, slipping his tongue into his mouth.

He thinks of everything below him: his old tailoring workshop, where he got a stab at being a person again. His basement at home where he hid all of the bodies. The tunnels of Mount Massive, an underground city that went unseen entirely by the public. And most prominently, all of the violence that he and Chris have been responsible for, and all the ways they’ve tried to soothe each other’s souls over it.

But right now, he doesn’t give a fuck about all the things below him.

Only what’s ahead.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> when I was writing this story, it was always going to end sad.  
> but towards the end, I made an executive decision: no more sad gays. only strong gays.  
> so these are my strong gays recreating their lives for each other.  
> I love them & everyone who has read along with me and offered their thoughts.  
> thank you.


End file.
